Mutation - part 3: Aliased Mutability

Sun, Mar 3, 2019

Interior Mutability Aliased data We say that data is aliased / shared when it may be accessed from multiple variables or places: a static variable can be accessed from anywhere1 at anytime, and is thus always considered shared. a variable being borrowed with a & _ reference (hence my calling these references &shared _). a variable owned by a smart pointer offering Shared Ownership such as Rc or Arc.

Mutation - part 2: To mut or not to mut

Sun, Feb 24, 2019

Categories	Teaching, Rust, Programming
Tags	rust C mutation variable meta programming globals

Prelude From the previous post: A (runtime) variable is a (static) binding to some place in memory, and is used to read/write from/into that place in memory Let’s illustrate it again with an example. The following code fn foo(){letx=42;lety=i32::wrapping_add(x,27)asu8;} unsugars to1: fn foo(){// allocate 4 bytes in the stack frame & bind at_x to its address letx: i32;// type inferred // allocate 1 byte in the stack frame & bind at_y to its address lety: u8;// type inferred *at_x=42;*at_y=i32::wrapping_add(*at_x,27)asu8;} So, whenever there is a variable var, the actual binding is from at_var to some address in memory, and var is just sugar for *at_var2.

Mutation - Part 1: Variables

Sun, Feb 17, 2019

Categories	Teaching, Rust, Programming
Tags	rust C examples mutation variable meta programming

What is a variable? Ok, here there is really a lot that could be said, and a simple blog post will not cover it. I will just talk about two important and distinct thinking patterns involved: the idea of binding a name to a value; the idea of reading/writing values from/into memory; 1. Identity binding The best example in Rust for “just a binding” (i.e., with no backing memory) is const

Mutation - Part 0: Intro

Sun, Feb 17, 2019

Categories	Teaching, Rust, Programming
Tags	rust C examples mutation variable meta programming

For a first programming post, I have chosen an innocent-looking topic, regarding Rust’s mut keyword: What does mut truly mean? what does it do? For starters, let’s quote TRPL1: Mutability, the ability to change something Hum, it looks like they got it the other way around. Let’s fix it: Mutability, the ability to change something Mutability, the property of being change-able Note the change in the grammatical aspect: if a mutator modifies a mutatee, the mutability required for it to be possible is the mutatee’s one (and not the mutator’s).

My first post ... and blog

Sat, Feb 16, 2019

Categories	Meta, Introspection
Tags	meta

git commit? It has been a while since I wanted to make the jump and dive into the publishing my thoughts and experiments to the World Wide Web experience. However, the most likely outcome is that I be its only reader. But I’d be content with that. Still, I do believe that some of my tinkering and experimentation could be of interest for other like-minded people. I (would?) like to think it is the main reason of my going public.