Rusty Russell

Rusty Russell’s Quiet Corner of The Internet

“If you didn’t run code written by assholes, your machine wouldn’t boot”

This was passed on to me by Ben Elliston, ex-gcc hacker and good guy.  Amusing in context, but the corollary is that working on free software mean...

I wrote this over 15 years ago, and it still rings true: separate the art from the artist. It's a key stabilizing principle for me when navigating Bitcoin developers.

Now I have a shell script `rcargo` which remote compiles rust crates: I work on my laptop but have beefy machines on my home and work LANs. You'd have to reimplement cargo to do it much finer-grained, apparently: sccache used to and gave up? The real trick is ssh's ControlPath config var, which allows shared connection for much-improved speed: ChatGPT taught me this one! The other option is Nix, but I'm not *that* bored!

crates.io: Rust Package Registry

Second Rust crate, re-implementing a utility I had written several times and see. This one takes a more thorough approach and handles corner cases a bit better. I also added percentile support which is actually quite cute. Basically, if you have a pile of text lines, which contains some numbers, something like you've run a benchmark 20 times, produced a pile of output, line stats will gather similar lines and show you the stats on the numbers.

Sometimes people speak of Bitcoin and I get a moment of disorientation before I realize they're speaking of it as an *investment*. Like gold, oil, Nvidia stock, etc. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's a single dimension: up good, down bad. Corollaries: 1. This is fungible: there are other investments, some of which may be better at going up. 2. They may be "really into" Bitcoin, but it's a phase: some other financial winner will come along. 3. There are no deep insights here, just a lot of effort to predict numbers. 4. They're not wrong: finance is important. But for me it's like doing my taxes: I do it, but I kinda resent the time I spend on it.

Paused my reading of The Mandibles for Xmas day: It's not exactly holiday reading. It's one thing to know nothing stops this train. It's another thing to read through a detailed description of what the slow inevitable crash looks like: It's like the right brain equivalent of When Money Dies.

My second week of Rust (only a few hours a day though: I am on vacation after all) has me reproducing and enhancing a tool I wrote in C. It takes multiple lines and runs stats on the numbers in it. This is useful for quick benchmarks: `for i in $(seq 10); do /usr/bin/time myprog; done | linestats`. Each line with the same literal parts is combined, with numbers replaced by "min-max(mean+/-stddev)". The C one wasn't very clever about decimals, so it needed a good rewrite. The new code works, but needs polish, more options, optimization, tests and documentation before I release it. The good thing about these small projects is they don't get hamstrung by Rust's glacial build times!

I have published my first Rust crate. A the library that I've always wanted to exist and would normally have written in C, so it was a good chance to experiment with rust.

syncless - Rust

syncless: ordered, atomic storage without durability guarantees.

1. No, I'm not reading your article on quantum. 2. Yes, all choices are bad. That's what "breaking" means. 3. I'm glad smart people are thinking about technical mitigations.