Published inLevel Up Coding·Sep 17Learning Rust: Avoiding PanicsIs Rust’s safety net as foolproof as you think or are there instances where the system can still panic? Rust is well-known primarily for its safety features, largely attributed to its borrowing system. But it’s not just the compiler-enforced borrowing system that contributes to Rust’s safety; explicit error handling also…Rust5 min readRust5 min read
Published inLevel Up Coding·Sep 14Learning Rust: ZLIB and DEFLATETired of just using libraries and want to understand what makes them tick? Writing a DEFLATE decompressor in Rust will take you on an intellectual journey through data structures, algorithms and more. Sometimes we interact directly with it through ZIP or GZip files. At other times, its influence is more…Rust24 min readRust24 min read
Published inLevel Up Coding·Aug 27Learning Rust: Huffman CodingWant to understand Huffman coding inside-out? Grab your Rust compiler and let’s dive in. Data compression is really important, but we don’t talk about it much. One key player in this area is Huffman coding. This article will make Huffman coding easy to understand, whether you’ve heard of it before…Rust10 min readRust10 min read
Published inLevel Up Coding·Aug 20Learning Rust: Zero Cost AbstractionBlazing fast, incredibly abstracted: How does Rust achieve this? A program may comprise thousands or millions of lines of code. If we try to keep all the details of this code in our minds all the time, we may quickly feel overwhelmed. Instead, we use abstraction to hide away the…Rust3 min readRust3 min read
Published inLevel Up Coding·Aug 16Learning Rust: BitstreamHow much speed are we sacrificing in the name of Rust’s safety features? Having recently worked on Huffman Codes, I attempted to create a kind of bitstream that would allow me to retrieve all bits one by one (from LSB to MSB). This problem has already been addressed by the…Rust3 min readRust3 min read
Published inLevel Up Coding·Aug 12Learning Rust: Rolling BitsHow do bits find their rhythm in Rust? Going into shifts, rotations and the subtle nuances of code optimization. I recently needed bit manipulation and was curious about implementing a circular left shift in Rust. This operation rotates bits to the left, and the bits that overflow to the left…Rust4 min readRust4 min read
Published inLevel Up Coding·Aug 4Learning Rust: Run-Length EncodingCurious about how our computing ancestors managed to compress the earliest images? Let’s explore the naïve technique they used, akin to the ‘byte-squeezing’ methods of a bygone era. Images and computers have had a longstanding relationship. We’ve grown fond of storing and showcasing these images on our devices such as…Rust11 min readRust11 min read
Published inLevel Up Coding·Jul 29Learning Rust: Docker & PostgresCan orchestrating Docker containers with Rust transform the way we approach software testing? Docker has become the go-to solution when we want to explore something new without cluttering our local development environment. It may also be chosen when an application is particularly difficult or time-consuming to configure for local development…Rust4 min readRust4 min read
Published inLevel Up Coding·Jul 27Learning Rust: Unix SocketsWant to learn about Unix sockets and their role in the SSH Agent protocol? This article explains the basics. Recently, I had some trouble with my OpenSSH Authentication Agent on my Windows system. It was supposed to easily pass my SSH key to VSCode, which was running Docker containers. I…Rust4 min readRust4 min read
Published inLevel Up Coding·Jul 25Learning Rust: HashingEver pondered on how to deduplicate massive amounts of binary data? Data hashing is a fundamental concept used in computer science. It is primarily used in integrity checking, encryption and deduplication. It relies on hash determinism. …Rust6 min readRust6 min read
