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rust is good, just not for me

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Rust is the big new¹ thing in just about every programming niche. web frameworks? of course there’s a Rust one! in fact, there’s dozens of them. command line tools? good luck finding one that isn’t written in Rust these days. databases? oops, all Rust!

all of this carcinisation² has me feeling kind of left out, though. you see, i’ve never really vibed with Rust: i have tried it multiple times, even building a handful of (unfinished, naturally) projects with it, but i always bounce off of it eventually. for a long time, i attributed this to Rust just not being what it’s hyped up to be, that it’s actually a lot worse than everyone says it is, but… it really isn’t. it is a good programming language. a great one, in fact! i want to dig a little deeper into why i, personally, don’t vibe with it. (not very deep, mind you, because self-reflection is difficult as hell)

go's panics are fundamentally flawed

Tue, 05 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

(alternative title: panic() considered harmful)

errors, how do they work anyway?

errors in Go programs are represented by values. when calling a function that may return an error, it’ll return (T, error), and you can handle the error the same way you would any other value.

(note: the (T, error) syntax doesn’t imply Go has tuples, because it doesn’t. functions can just return multiple values.)

now, this approach does have some problems. Go lets you ignore the error very easily, by using the discard operator _ rather than assigning it to a variable. it’s also extremely verbose–anyone who has used Go a substantial amount has written if err != nil { return err } a thousand times. both of these issues are fixable, though: the compiler could emit a warning or an error (heh) when discarding an error value, and new syntax could be introduced to bubble errors up more easily.

hello world!

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

oh hey, it’s the stereotypical “hello world” post. look at me! i copy pasted a hugo tutorial!

turns out making a blog is really difficult, and not for technical reasons. it’s just really hard to actually write things consistently. i can’t promise anything in that regard–expect this site to get about one post a year, and that’s if i actually remember it exists.

until then though, have fun reading the one rant i’ve already written. hope you like go because if not, it probably isn’t for you!