How often does Rust change?
Steve Klabnik
by Steve Klabnik
4y ago
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how often Rust changes. There are some people that assert that Rust stays fairly static these days, and there are some people who say Rust is still changing far too much. In this blog post, I want to make a data driven analysis of this question. First, I will present my hypothesis. Next, my methodology. Then, we’ll talk about the results. Afterward, we’ll discuss possible methodological issues, and possible directions for further research. As said on twitter: The hypothesis # My personal take on Rust changing: to me, it feels like we had more change in ..read more
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"C is how the computer works" is a dangerous mindset for C programmers
Steve Klabnik
by Steve Klabnik
4y ago
A long time ago, I wrote “Should you learn C to “learn how the computer works”?”. This was part 1 in a three part series. A year later, I got around to part 2, ““C is not how the computer works” can lead to inefficient code”. It’s been five more months. I don’t think I really want to write out the third part; I expected this to be a quick series of blog posts, not something that was on my plate for a year and a half. Here’s the thesis of part 3: Part three is going to show what happens if you make a mistake with the ideas from part two. If you incorrectly assume that C’s abstract model maps ..read more
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A sad day for Rust
Steve Klabnik
by Steve Klabnik
4y ago
actix-web is dead. This situation is bad, from all sides. When Rust was a tiny, tiny community, I thought to myself, “wow, I wonder how long this will last? Probably 1.0 will kill it.” Sort of playing off of Eternal September, I assumed that over time, the community would grow, and we’d encounter problems. Today is the first day where I say to myself, okay, has that happened? This story is not super clear-cut. I’m not going to link to a dozen citations, or try to prove that I’m some sort of neutral party here. I’m going to give you account of this story as I remember it and as I felt it. Be ..read more
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"C is not how the computer works" can lead to inefficient code
Steve Klabnik
by Steve Klabnik
4y ago
A little over a year ago, I wrote “Should you learn C to ‘learn how the computer works’”. It was a bit controversial. I had promised two follow-up posts. It’s taken me a year, but here’s the first one. In that post, I argued that C doesn’t “work like the computer”, but rather, by a concept called the “C abstract machine.” It happens to be close to how computers operate in some sense, but that when you write C, you’re writing for the abstract machine, not the computer itself. Here’s the trick, though: the C abstract machine doesn’t define every single aspect of how computation happens. And so ..read more
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Porting steveklabnik.com to Workers Sites and Zola
Steve Klabnik
by Steve Klabnik
4y ago
One fun thing about having a personal domain is that you can keep the contents the same forever, but take a few days every so often to port it to some new stack you want to try out. A while back, I had my site on GitHub Pages using Jekyll. This has long been the sort of default, go-to stack for me. At some point, I decided to simplify even further, and wrote a small script to take the few Markdown files I have and just make HTML out of them. I then used Netlify to do the hosting. I wanted to try out their legendary ease of use, and it was indeed super simple. Earlier this year, I took a job ..read more
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I'm joining Cloudflare
Steve Klabnik
by Steve Klabnik
5y ago
Yesterday, I signed an offer letter from Cloudflare. I’ll be the product manager of Storage, which is the part of the company that’s working on data storage products for the Cloudflare Workers platform. I’ll be starting at the end of the month. I think a lot of you will say “that makes perfect sense,” but many more will say “wait, what?”. I hope this post will make things a bit more clear. Before we start, I also want to say that I’ll still be continuing my work on Rust, though obviously in a more limited capacity. I’ll still be working on revisions to The Rust Programming Language, and do ..read more
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What comes after "open source"
Steve Klabnik
by Steve Klabnik
5y ago
In a previous post, I discussed the history of open source, and ended with this claim: Today’s developers have never learned about this history, or don’t care about it, or actively think it’s irrelevant. … For the same reasons that “open source” came up with a new name, I think the movement that will arise from today’s developers will also need a new name. We talked about the ideological history of open source, but that’s not what developers object to, really. I don’t think developers are moving back towards a world of making source code private. Instead, it’s something related to a very old ..read more
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Rust has finally outgrown me
Steve Klabnik
by Steve Klabnik
5y ago
Today is a very interesting day. It’s giving me a lot of feels. Today is Rust Latam, a Rust conference in Montevideo. And I’m not there. This is significant because, as far as we know, I’m the only person who has been to every Rust conference in existence so far. I went to RustCamp, all three RustConfs, all five RustFests so far, all three Rust Belt Rusts. One RustRush. Am I forgetting any? Thirteen Rust conferences in the past four years. I really wanted to attend Rust Latam. The main organizer, Santiago, has been a friend for a very long time. It’s amazing that we’re getting a new confere ..read more
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The culture war at the heart of open source
Steve Klabnik
by Steve Klabnik
5y ago
There’s a war going on. When isn’t there a war going on? But I’m not talking about a physical war here: I’m talking about a war over meaning. This particular war is a fight over what “open source” means. Let’s take a few steps back.  The Free Software Foundation People organize into groups for many reasons. This story starts with the story of an organization called the “GNU Project.” It was started in 1983, and here’s the initial announcement on USENET. I’ve pulled out four important paragraphs: Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible software system calle ..read more
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