I used to like C++. I still do, but I used to, too. Joking aside, I am not one to tell any C++ programmer to just use Rust. There are a ton of valid reasons why companies or individuals decide to use C++ and I don’t wish to deter anyone from doing so. What I am trying to do in this article is to see how Rust stacks up against a handful of very common (and severe) bugs that are easy to produce in C++. I tried to make this article worthwile for both Rust and C++ programmers.

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The rayon library is a brilliant piece of engineering that is so simple to use that one seldom has to descend into its depths. This is the story of how I learned to implement rayon’s ParallelIterator trait for my own type. There are tons of guides on how to use rayon’s parallel iterators and there are a few explanations on how they work under the hood. However, I found no tutorials on how to implement a parallel iterator from the ground up. This article aims to close that gap.

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The other day I wondered if there is a way to metaprogam a syntax that returns a type based on a conditional expression akin to an if…else if…else expression. The idea came to me when I searched for a programmatic way to choose the right size of integer for a bitset, given a certain number of bits. And yes, I know there’s std::bitset, but I’ll take any excuse to investigate an interesting metaprogramming problem.

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Recently I hit a stack overflow error in Rust and I found a helpful quick and dirty way of debugging it using a tool that a friendly member of the community hacked. If you hit a stack overflow and are too lazy to fire up your debugger, this article is for you.

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A while ago I wrote an article about a small project that I did in the Zig Programming Language about controlling GPIO on the Raspberry Pi. Zig is a neat language and the whole project ended up being a whole lot of fun. You can read the article here. Although Zig is a very new – and, at the time of writing, immature– language I encourage everyone to take a look, because rather than aiming to replace C++ in all its power and complexity, it aims to replace C which makes it conceptually very different from a language like Rust.

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By popular demand this site now supports both a light and a dark theme. There is no explicit way to switch between light and dark mode, instead the site will adapt to the browser preferences.

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I am currently getting into embedded programming with C at work and while there are some things I learned to appreciate about the simplicity of C, two of the things I really miss are generics and stricter type safety. I wondered if C++ can offer a safer way of reading types from arrays of bytes. This, of course, gives me an excuse to work out my C++ template metaprogramming muscles, which have atrophied a little.

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In a recent attempt to write some clever code, I set out to implement mutually exclusive traits and some blanket implementations involving these. In doing so, I hit the limits of what the compiler can do for me, but after a lot of trial-and-error, researching, and flashing the bat signal to the Rust community I had something that worked. This is how to get mutually exclusive traits working in current Rust for Future Me™ and anyone else who might be interested.

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In the last months, I have been developing three crates for Rust. All of these crates are open source libraries that use different aspects of the language. The first crate is a numerics library, which emphasizes interfaces that are powerful but simple to use. The second one is a fluent coding library using mostly declarative macros and the third crate uses procedural macros to help with expressive assertions. For my next series of posts I am going to introduce these three crates and highlight a particular aspect of each one. First up is the varpro library.

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Inspired by the previous article on creating a common interface to call and pass functions of different numbers of arguments in Rust, I wanted to see if and how I could make this work in C++. I was able to get a very similar thing working in C++ at the expense of some of my sanity. Here we go.

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I am working on a little numerics project where the goal is to let the user pass base functions to a data-fitting model in a simple fashion. And while I really like what Rust’s lambdas can already do for me, I was wondering if I can pass functions with different (but compile time constant) numbers of parameters using a single interface. It turns out that I can, and the answer is a nice combination of Rust and C++ metaprogramming idioms.

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I was going to write something about how windowing could be used to mitigate the effects of spectral leakage in the DFT. However, I went down a rabbit hole trying to truly understand where spectral leakage comes from and how it relates to the periodicity of the DFT. What I ended up writing, is a post that is more about understanding the DFT and less about windowing, although it plays an important role in this post.

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I have extensively worked with the Fourier transform and the DFT but never really taken the time to understand how these two things are truly connected and how that connection explains some of the properties of the DFT. In this article I explore this connection with the aim of answering one question: what does the DFT actually compute?

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In the previous post on concurrency we have explored the different paradigms for protecting shared data with mutexes in Rust versus C++. Here we will look at emulating a Rust Arc<Mutex<T>> type to protect concurrent access to a shared resource of type T in C++.

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I have been using Rust in production for a couple of months now and there is lots about it that I like. One neat thing is that Rust’s compile time guarantees make memory and thread safety much harder to mess up from the get go. This allows Rust programmers to confidently use some paradigms that are harder to use correctly in C++. One such example is protecting shared data with mutexes, which works very differently in Rust than in C++. This post is about exploring those fundamental differences.

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I recently got it into my head to write a compile time version of the FizzBuzz Coding Kata. Coding Katas are a great way of improving our programing skills, so why not use them to improve our metaprogramming skills as well? Here’s what I came up with.

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I came across the problem of printing a tuple of different types to cout and thought I would jot down my solution. This isn’t an original solution of mine, but I wanted to remember the ideas behind it, so I am writing it down for Future Me™ and anyone else who’s interested.

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In this part we will complete the implementation of the if expression to replace the ternary operator. Furthermore, we will look into limitations and extensions of the implementation.

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Right now I am getting into Rust, which lets me see the paradigms of C++ in a new light. This is a small thing, but for example: C++ has if statements and Rust has if expressions which can return a value. This inspired me to implement an expressive syntax for mimicking Rust’s if expressions in C++. To keep things simple, I only targeted the use case of replacing nested ternary operators.

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This is the last part of my series on a pipe syntax for operations on std::optional types. We will look at switching between function overloads at compile time using std::enable_if to implement the last puzzle piece we were missing before. I will also show some limitations of my implementation and describe how my pipe operator fits in to the overarching idea of functional programming.

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