23 June 2023 — 25 min, 6316 words
Who doesn't like special privileges? In Rust, the macros grant us this little extra authority over the language, enabling any developer to produce Rust source code from a domain-specific language or to modify the existing code by attaching an attribute.
Macros are undoubtedly a great and powerful feature, but isn't there a risk that we substitute them for new features that would have otherwise improved the language and its libraries? And aren't they sometimes gnawing away at the clarity of the code?
Let's examine this issue in the context of language evolution, and see if we can make a few suggestions.
15 June 2023 — 4 min, 1045 words
Are you someone who scribbles annotations in book margins? Or do you regard that as an unthinkable defilement? For me, it's the latter; I couldn't bring myself to write in a book, or even to dog-ear any page to mark an interesting paragraph. So instead, I stick notes or jot some comments down somewhere else, but I inevitably lose track and curse myself for not keeping things tidier. This may be familiar to some of you.
I've also tried to keep software recipes and tricks of the trade in a wiki, which works well to build a personal reference but is not appropriate for sharing opinions and discussing subjects. It would be too chaotic.
It was time to try something else, and this is what you are reading now: a blog.