Hi :) I’ve been working on a project called configure, which is intended to create a uniform way to load configuration variables from the environment of the program. Specifically, the goal is to create something that libraries can rely on to allow applications to delegate decisions about how configuration is loaded to applications, without those applications having to write a lot of bespoke configuration management glue. Storing configuration in the environment “The 12 Factor App” has this very good advice about managing configuration:…

The Rust project has requested blog posts about the project’s goals for 2018. I found myself in pretty much complete agreement with Nick Cameron’s post, so I thought instead I would write about my own personal goals for Rust in 2018. I am fortunate enough to work on Rust full-time; modulated by the work that needs to get done to accomplish larger team goals, these are some things that I’m individually very motivated to make progress on in 2018.…

Unsafety in Rust is often discussed in terms the primitive operations that can only be performed inside of unsafe blocks (such as dereferencing raw pointers and accessing mutable statics). I want to look at it from a different angle from these primitive operations, and instead focus on the capability to produce unsafe abstractions. The general concept of unsafe abstractions An unsafe abstraction is a new abstraction which requires the unsafe keyword to apply to some context (this is an intentionally “abstract” definition, because as we will see there are several highly divergent forms of unsafe abstraction supported in Rust).…

Oftentimes when I am conversing about the design of Rust with other users - as on RFCs or the internals forum - I witness a peculiar remark about “explicitness.” It usually goes something like this: I do not like Feature Design X because it is too implicit. Magic is okay in Other Language Y, but Rust is supposed to be an explicit language, so we should go with Feature Design Z instead.…

I’ve just published failure 0.1.1 to crates.io. It’s mostly some incremental improvements to failure that have been suggested since the first release two weeks ago. Improvements to the derive A big change in version 0.1.1 is that the derive can be used without depending on the failure_derive crate separately. All that needs to be done is tagging the extern crate statement with #[macro_use]: // No direct dependency on `failure_derive` #[macro_use] extern crate failure; #[derive(Fail, Debug)] #[fail(display = "An error occurred.…

I’m really excited to announce a new crate I’ve been working on, called failure, and which I’ve just released to crates.io. Failure is a Rust library intended to make it easier to manage your error types. This library has been heavily influenced by learnings we gained from previous iterations in our error management story, especially the Error trait and the error-chain crate. The Fail trait The core abstraction in failure is the Fail trait, a replacement for the existing std::error::Error trait.…

cargo gained a new feature this week! You can now download dependencies from alternative registries, alongside the dependencies you download from crates.io. This is an important step in enabling organizations to distribute their internal libraries through cargo without requiring them to upload those libraries to a public registry. This feature will be available on nightly only, and it is gated behind the alternative-registries feature gate. We’ve used feature gates to iterate on new and unstable features in rustc since the 1.…

Previously, I attempted to maintain a blog using GitHub Pages. I was very unsuccessful at actually producing blog posts, though. I don’t care a lot about the appearance or maintenance of my blog site. What I want from the experience is the same experience I have writing Rust RFCs (because I have a lot of experience doing that): I write some markdown. I commit and push. Other people can read it.…

The problem: defining a ‘handshake’ protocol between two traits You have a problem that decomposes in this way: you want any type which implements trait Alpha to be composable with any type which implements trait Omega… That is, if Foo and Bar are both Alphas and Baz and Quux are both Omegas, you can compose Foo with Baz or Quux, and the same with Bar, and so on. This is not a trivial problem.…

A while ago I was considering an idea, so I wrote a tweet to ask what folks thought about it. A very spirited discussion followed about the Rust module system and what the pain points with it were (indeed - whether or not there were pain points at all). Depending on your skill at navigating Twitter’s UI, you may or may not be able to read the whole discussion by following the link above.…