Blog
How to Query (Almost) Everything
July 22, 2024 - 6387 words - 32 minsIn 2022, I gave a talk at a virtual conference with an unforgettable name: HYTRADBOI, which stands for "Have You Tried Rubbing a Database On It?" Its goal was to discuss unconventional uses of database-like technology, and featured many excellent talks.
My talk "How to Query (Almost) Everything" received copious praise. It describes the Trustfall query engine's architecture, and includes real-world examples of how my (now-former) employer relies on it to statically catch and prevent cross-domain bugs across a monorepo with hundreds of services and shared libraries. For example:
read moreThe Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
April 01, 2024 - 2033 words - 11 minsSemVer in Rust: Tooling, Breakage, and Edge Cases — FOSDEM 2024
March 18, 2024 - 10726 words - 54 minsFour challenges cargo-semver-checks has yet to tackle
January 23, 2024 - 2117 words - 11 minsMy last post covered the key cargo-semver-checks
achievements from 2023. Here are the biggest challenges that lie ahead!
Many of the remaining challenges in cargo-semver-checks are obvious: we all want more lints, fewer false-positives, etc. etc. Let's set those aside.
Instead, let's talk about four non-obvious challenges we have yet to tackle:
read moreHighlights of 2023 for cargo-semver-checks
January 16, 2024 - 1679 words - 9 minsChecking semver in the presence of doc(hidden) items
November 18, 2023 - 2882 words - 15 minscargo-semver-checks
v0.25 squashes nearly all bugs related to doc(hidden)
items — its most common source of false-positives. What does doc(hidden)
mean in Rust, and why was handling it correctly so hard?
Semver violations are common, better tooling is the answer
September 07, 2023 - 3270 words - 17 minsBreaking semver in Rust by adding a private type, or by adding an import
May 08, 2023 - 3718 words - 19 minsA few days ago, I started polls on Mastodon and Twitter whether adding a new private type, or an import, can ever be a major breaking change. The consensus was that this should be impossible.
I agree with that. It should be impossible.
I've discovered a way to cause a previously-public type or function to disappear from a crate's public API by making innocuous-seeming changes like adding a private type or adding an import, etc. It is not a hypothetical problem, either — I've found at least one real-world Rust project that has been affected by it.
read moreA definitive guide to sealed traits in Rust
April 05, 2023 - 2166 words - 11 minsFor the longest time, I thought that "sealed trait" in Rust was a singular concept implementable in one specific way. To prevent downstream crates from implementing your traits, you make the traits sealed — done, end of story. I was wrong! It turns out there are multiple ways to seal traits, forming a pleasant spectrum of options:
read moreMediocrity can be a sign of excellence, and other stories
April 01, 2023 - 2208 words - 12 minsRe-exporting an enum with a type alias is breaking, but not major
March 06, 2023 - 813 words - 5 minsWe've already explored some of the dark corners of Rust semantic versioning on this blog:
read moreSpeeding up Rust semver-checking by over 2000x
February 07, 2023 - 3926 words - 20 minsThis post describes work in progress: how cargo-semver-checks
will benefit from the upcoming query optimization API in the Trustfall query engine. Read on to learn how a modern linter works under the hood, and how ideas from the world of databases can improve its performance.
Moving and re-exporting a Rust type can be a major breaking change
January 31, 2023 - 1194 words - 6 minsSome Rust breaking changes don't require a major version
January 26, 2023 - 1848 words - 10 minsTurning a Rust struct into an enum is not always a major breaking change
January 24, 2023 - 1611 words - 9 minscargo-semver-checks today and in 2023
December 23, 2022 - 1946 words - 10 minsFalsehoods programmers believe about undefined behavior
November 27, 2022 - 2421 words - 13 minsMy HYTRADBOI'22 Jam
October 03, 2022 - 1121 words - 6 minsDebugging Safari: If at first you succeed, don't try again
September 19, 2022 - 1887 words - 10 minsToward fearless cargo update
August 25, 2022 - 1866 words - 10 minsI recently built cargo-semver-checks
, a linter that ensures crates adhere to semantic versioning. This is why and how I built it.
Fearless development is a key theme throughout Rust. "If it compiles, it works", fearless concurrency, etc.
But there's one aspect of Rust (and nearly all other languages) that isn't entirely fearless yet: cargo update
, upgrading the versions of the project's dependencies.