Rust

A 3-post collection

on Programming, Rust, Macros, Compilers, The Basics, Low-level • 28 min read

Stack Machines and Where To Find Them

Ever tried googling "recursion"?

screenshot of a Google search for "recursion". The results begin with "Did you mean: recursion"

There's something quite peculiar about recursion. Every developer and their dog has heard of it at some point, and most developers seem to have quite a strong opinion about it.

Sometimes, they were taught about it in college. Some old professor with a gray beard and funny words (the hell's a cons cell? why are you asking if I want to have s-expr with you?) made them write Lisp or Caml for a semester, growling at the slightest sign of loops or mutability to the poor student whose only experience with programming yet was Java-like OOP. Months spent writing factorials, linked lists, Fibonacci sequences, depth-first searches, and other algorithms with no real-world use whatsoever.

Other times, it was by misfortune. While writing code in any of their usual C-family enterprise-grade languages, they accidentally made a function call itself, and got greeted by a cryptic error message about something flowing over a stack. They looked it up on Google (or Yahoo? AltaVista? comp.lang.java?) and quickly learned that they had just stumbled upon some sort of arcane magic that, in addition to being a simply inefficient way of doing things was way too complicated for any

on Programming, Rust, Hardware • 20 min read

Crabs All the Way Down: Running Rust on Logic Gates

💡
This article will discuss many topics, from CPU architecture design to historical shenanigans. Take a drink, it's downhill from there.

Even though the number has steadily decreased since the 90s, there are still many different and incompatible CPU architectures in use nowadays. Most computers use x86_64 and pretty much all mobile devices and recent Macs use some kind of ARM64-based ISA (instruction set architecture).

In specific fields, though, there are more exotic ones: most routers still use MIPS (for historical reasons), a roomful of developers use RISC-V, the PS3 used PowerPC, some servers 20 years ago used Itanium, and of course IBM still sells their S/390-based mainframes (now rebranded as z/Architecture). The embedded world has even more: AVR (used in Arduino), SuperH (Saturn, Dreamcast, Casio 9860 calculators), and the venerable 8051, an Intel chip from 1980 which is still being produced, sold and even extended by third parties.

All these architectures differ on their defining characteristics, the main ones being:

  • word size: 8, 16, 31, 32, 64 bits, sometimes more
  • design style: RISC (few instructions, simple operations), CISC (many instructions, performing complex operations, VLIW (long instructions, doing many things at once in parallel)
  • memory architecture: Harvard (separate

on Programming, Rust, Macros, Compilers, Code analysis • 17 min read

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Macros

Rust macros are powerful, that's a fact. I mean, they allow running any code at compile-time, of course they're powerful.

C macros, which are at the end of the day nothing more than glorified text substitution rules, allow you to implement new, innovative, modern language constructs, such as:

#define ever (;;)
for ever { 
	...
}
https://stackoverflow.com/a/652802/2196124

or even:

#include <iostream>
#define System S s;s
#define public
#define static
#define void int
#define main(x) main()
struct F{void println(char* s){std::cout << s << std::endl;}};
struct S{F out;};

public static void main(String[] args) {
	System.out.println("Hello World!");
}
https://stackoverflow.com/a/653028/2196124

But these are just silly examples written for fun. Nobody would ever commit such macro abuse in real-world, production code. Nobody...

/*	mac.h	4.3	87/10/26	*/

/*
 *	UNIX shell
 *
 *	S. R. Bourne
 *	Bell Telephone Laboratories
 *
 */
 
...

#define IF		if(
#define THEN	){
#define ELSE	} else {
#define ELIF	} else if (
#define FI		;}

#define BEGIN	{
#define END		}
#define SWITCH	switch(
#define IN		){
#define ENDSW	}
#define FOR		for(
#define WHILE	while(
#define DO		){
#define OD		;}
#define REP		do{
#define PER		}while(
#undef DONE
#define DONE	);
#define LOOP	for(