code and bitters

The other day I made a joke on twitter, and learned some interesting things about raw pointers in Rust.

The abridged joke goes something like this:

Yosh: What do you mean Rust doesn't ship with rand built-in?

Me: ASLR to the rescue!

fn main() {
    let rand = main as usize;
    dbg!(rand);
}

I always forget the exact syntax to do shallow clones in git. I recently tracked it down for a few different use cases, so I thought I'd document them in one place since the documentation is kind of diffuse.

This project began the way many of my long Rust articles do-- I got curious about something. I started to wonder a few weeks ago about the relationship between crates that I download from crates.io, and the crate's upstream repository. Here are some of the questions I wanted to answer:

• How do I tell which git commit matches the published crate?
• Is there any guarantee that the published crate source matches the git source?
• What kinds of best practices exist? Is there room for improvement?

I recently became curious about the different tools that are available to do one specific thing in Rust: provide an implementation of the std::io::Write trait for an in-memory buffer.

This might be useful if you have serializable data that you want to store in a database, or if you want to add checksums or perform compression before storing or sending some data. It may also be useful for buffering ordinary network writes (though BufWriter might be easier).

How can this be done in Rust? What's the most efficient way of buffering serialized data?

For some reason, I find myself thinking a lot about Rust enums, and matches, and the various ways one can write them.