Rust

A 2-post collection

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(