Like many people who have backgrounds in higher level languages like JavaScript and Ruby, one thing that really attracted me to Rust was the ability to get “closer to the metal”. While Rust offers plenty of high level abstractions, it certainly makes you think a bit more about lower level concerns like the memory allocation than the JavaScript or Ruby do. But of course, you can always go deeper, and learning more about the abstraction layer underneath Rust can be a really great way to really understand what makes Rust tick....
A while back the Rust team did their annual call for blog posts asking for perspective on what the community thinks the next year in Rust should look like. Here are my thoughts (albeit a bit late). Process and Governance The most important issues for the Rust community to face in 2020 are process and governance. At the end of the day I think governance and process go hand in hand, so I’ll discuss the issues related to them together....
In 2019 I tried out posting to dev.to. While I really enjoyed using the site and the community there is great, I ultimately decided to come back to posting on my own blog. Here are links to those articles: The Promise of WebAssembly The Most Minimal Serverless Function Giving TodoMVC the API It Deserves 64 Cores on Fire: Supercharging My Development Experience ...
This was posted originally on opensource.com. In Why should you use Rust in WebAssembly?, I looked at why you might want to write WebAssembly (Wasm), and why you might choose Rust as the language to do it in. Now I’ll share what that looks like by exploring ways to embed Rust inside JavaScript. This is something that separates Rust from Go, C#, and other languages with large runtimes that can compile to Wasm....
This was posted originally on opensource.com. WebAssembly (Wasm) is a technology that has the chance to reshape how we build apps for the browser. Not only will it allow us to build whole new classes of web applications, but it will also allow us to make existing apps written in JavaScript even more performant. In this article about the state of the Rust and Wasm ecosystem, I’ll try to explain why Rust is the language that can unlock the true potential of WebAssembly....
Most people assume that I studied computer science in university and that I’ve been coding since I was young. They’re usually surprised when I tell them that in fact I studied Marketing and Spanish and that although my brother taught me how to build a very basic web page in the early 2000s, I didn’t really start to learn to program until I was an adult with a job. The truth of the matter is that my story isn’t unique....
Today I start a new role on the Azure Developer Advocate team! If you’re not already familiar with developer advocacy check out this awesome post by Ashley McNamara. She does a really great job of describing what a developer advocate and advocacy in general are and aren’t. In short advocacy isn’t about selling or marketing but rather giving a voice to developers everywhere whether or not they use a company’s particular products....
I’ve already written my views on Rust 2019, but as I’ve been an occasional contributor to and a full-time follower of Rust’s WebAssembly story, I thought I’d offer my views there too. My hope is that 2019 will see a significant increase in the amount of time I spend with Rust, and I hope a good chunk of that time is in relation to wasm. A Full Stack Story Nick Fitzgerald has already highlighted in his Rust wasm post the need for the working group to contribute to libraries and tooling that are higher up in the stack....
The Rust core team has asked for the community to give their ideas on what they’d like to see from Rust in 2019 and give hints to what the next edition of Rust (tentatively Rust 2021) could be like. Here’s my take. Stabilizing Rust If you’re familiar with the history of Rust you might be confused with a call to stabilization. After all, Rust 2015 (a.k.a 1.0) was all about stabilization and the team has actually done a pretty good job with achieving this goal....
When it comes to computers and computer science, there are still lots of things I know very little about, and I suspect this will always be the case. Instead of learning something new and keeping it to myself, I thought I’d share the learnings in case they’re useful or interesting to others. For this post, I’ll be focusing on the wild world of font rasterization with tangents into Unicode and the OpenType file format....