Sounds interesting! As I don't know restic that this is apparently based on, what are the differentiating factors between them? While I'm always on board for a rewrite in Rust in general, I'm curious as to if there is anything more to it than that.

EDIT: seems this is already answered in the FAQ, my bad.

The term you are looking for in general is "reverse engineering". For software in particular you are looking at disassembly, decompilation and various forms of tracing and debugging.

As for particular software: For .NET there is ILSpy that can help you look into how things work. For native code I have used Ghidra in the past.

Native code is a lot more effort to understand. In both cases things like variable names names will be gone. Most function names will be missing (even more so for native code). Type names too. For native code the types themselves will be gone, so you will have to look at what is going on and guess if something is a struct or an array. How big is the struct and what are the fields?

Left over debug or logging lines are very valuable in figuring out what something is. Often times you have to go over a piece of disassembly or decompiled code several times as your understanding of it gradually builds.

C++ code with lots of object orientation tends to be easier to figure out the big picture of than C code, as the classes and inheritance provides a more obvious pattern.

Then there is dynamic tracing (running under some sort of debugger or call tracer to see what the software does). I have not had as much success with this.

Note that I'm absolutely an amateur at reverse engineering. I thought it was interesting enough that I wanted to learn it (and I had a small project where it was useful). But I'm mostly a programmer.

I have done a lot of low level programming (C, C++, even a small amount of assembly, in recent times a lot of Rust), and this knowledge helps when reverse engineering. You need to understand how compilers and linkers lowers code to machine code in order to have a fighting chance at reversing that.

Also note that there may be legal complications when doing reverse engineering, especially with regards to how you make use of the things you learned. I'm not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, etc. But check out the legal guidelines of Asahi Linux (who are working on reverse engineering M1 macs to run Linux on them): https://asahilinux.org/copyright/ (scroll down to "reverse engineering policy").

Now this covers (at a high level) how to figure things out. How you then patch closed source software I have no idea. Haven't looked into that, as my interest was in figuring out how hardware and drivers worked to make open source software talk to said hardware.

I have read it, it is a very good book, and the memory ordering and atomics sections are also applicable to C and C++ since all of these languages use the same memory ordering model.

Can strongly recommend it if you want to do any low level concurrency (which I do in my C++ day job). I recommended it to my colleagues too whenever they had occasion to look at such code.

I do wish there was a bit more on more obscure and advanced patterns though. Things like RCU, seqlocks etc basically get an honorable mention in chapter 10.

Yes, Sweden really screwed up the first attempt at switching to Gregorian calendar. But there were also multiple countries who switched back and forth a couple of times. Or Switzerland where each administrative region switched separately.

But I think we in Sweden still "win" for worst screw up. Also, there is no good way to handle these dates without specific reference to precise location and which calender they refer to (timestamps will be ambiguous when switching back to Julian calendar).

That assembly program the author compares to is waay bloated. This guy managed with 105 bytes: https://nathanotterness.com/2021/10/tiny_elf_modernized.html (that is with overlapping part of the code into the ELF header and other similar level shenanigans). ;)

All kidding aside, interesting article.

Swedish layout. Not ideal for coding (too many things like curly and square brackets etc are under altgr. And tilde and backtick are on dead keys.

But switching back and forth as soon as you need to write Swedish (for the letters åäö) is just too much work. And yes, in the Swedish alphabet they are separate letters, not aao with diacretics.

I don't feel like rust compile times are that bad, but I'm coming from C++ where the compile times are similar or even worse. (With gcc at work a full debug build takes 40 minutes, with clang it is down to about 17.)

Rust isn't an interpreted or byte code compiled language, and as such it is hard to compete with that. But that is comparing apples and oranges really. Better to compare with other languages that compile to machine code. C and C++ comes to mind, though there are of course others that I have less experience with (Fortran, Ada, Haskell, Go, Zig, ...). Rust is on par with or faster than C++ but much slower than C for sure. Both rust and C++ have way more features than C, so this is to be expected. And of course it also depends on what you do in your code (template heavy C++ is much slower to compile than C-like C++, similarly in Rust it depends on what you use).

That said: should we still strive to optimise the build times? Yes, of course. But please put the situation into the proper perspective and don't compare to Python (there was a quote by a python developer in the article).

Here are some I found and used in my own code:

• itertools
• regex
• anyhow and thiserror (error handling)
• indoc (indented/formatted multi line string literals)
• strum (various derive macros for enums)
• petgraph (for working with general graphs)
• winnow is a great (and fast) parser combinator library.
• bpaf, clap and xflags are three different command line argument parser libraries. Which one to use depends on the needs of the project and if you need to match the behaviour of an existing non-rust program (as I needed to in one case)

Saying “it’s a graph of commits” makes no sense to a layperson.

Sure, but git is aimed at programmers. Who should have learned graph theory in university. It was past of the very first course I had as an undergraduate many years ago.

Git is definitely hard though for almost all the reasons in the article, perhaps other reasons too. But not understanding what a DAG is shouldn't be one of them, for the intended target audience.

I really don't see what niche it is trying to fill that isn't already occupied.

Rust is as successful as it is because it found a previously unoccupied niche: safe systems programming without garbage collector and with high level abstractions that (mostly) optimise away.

I don't think "better C" is a big enough niche to be of interest to enough people for it to gain a critical mass. I certainly have very little interest in it myself.

Be sure to treat state and configuration separately. It doesn't matter on Windows as far as I know (they go in the same location), but on Linux those are supposed to go in different places.

Many programs get this wrong, and it is quite annoying as I track my config files in git. I don't want a diff just because the list of recently opened files changed! Or even worse: the program stores the last window size and position in the config file... (looking at you KDE!)

Here are some libraries I found to help with this in a cross platform way:

• https://lib.rs/crates/dirs
• https://lib.rs/crates/directories

I haven't tried either, haven't written such a program yet.

As for how to store data, there are indeed many options, depending on your needs:

• Plain text based formats (toml, yaml, JSON, ini, ...) can be good for configs and basic state. As a bonus it let's the user easily manage the file in version control if they are so inclined.
• Databases (SQLite mostly)
• Custom formats (binary files in a directory structure is often used for browser caches for example) .

Without knowing more it is hard to give specific advise.

A few crates do document this, but it is often missing indeed.

Sometimes I have seen it documented as comments in Cargo.toml as well.