Bash script to deploy my own Rust tools

While developing my own personal tools in Rust – which seems to be “the one” language of my own stuff now, after the disappointment of the consistent Go crashes –, I often need to compile and replace the current *.exe tool. The compile line I use is rather long, plus I want to standardize the steps, so I put out a shell script to automate the tasks.

This shell script must be placed at the project root.

EXE=program-name.exe

echo "Compiling $EXE..."
RUSTFLAGS="-C target-feature=+crt-static" cargo build --release --target x86_64-pc-windows-msvc

echo "Replacing old $EXE..."
mv ./target/x86_64-pc-windows-msvc/release/$EXE /d/Stuff/apps/_audio\ tools/.

echo "Cleaning up..."
rm -rf ./target/release
rm -rf ./target/x86_64-pc-windows-msvc

echo "Done."

I’m not versioning this script because it contains the directories on my computer, plus the command line itself is commented in the Cargo.toml file.

Fixing Visual Studio Code icon overlay color in Linux

A few months ago I had to dig into Visual Studio Code source until I found a change in the built-in light theme, where they changed the overlay color of the suspended autocomplete menu. This ended up being a question and an answer on StackOverflow, and it made up to my Windows patch.

There’s no patch for Linux, though. Another jab at my lack of multiplatform GUI framework – but I digress.

So, for the record, with Visual Studio Code standard *.deb installation, this is the file with the light theme:

/usr/share/code/resources/app/extensions/theme-defaults/themes/light_vs.json

The line to be commented out is:

"list.activeSelectionIconForeground": "#FFF"

Stateful iterators in Go

I’m writing an insane amount of Go code lately. It’s really unobtrusive, allowing you focus on the problem you have to solve. And I’ve been dabbling with iterators in Go for a while, since I started to used them in Rust – which is so much better than C++ in this regard.

Today, when researching the topic again, I found a very nice article on the matter, exploring a few possibilities. The most performant approach is a stateful iterator, which can be implemented as:

type IterFive struct {
	count int
}

func NewIterFive() IterFive {
	return Iter{}
}

func (it *IterFive) Value() int {
	it.count++
	return it.count - 1
}

func (it *IterFive) Ok() bool {
	return it.count < 5
}

func main() {
	for iter := NewIterFive(); iter.Ok(); {
		println(iter.Value())
	}
}

I’m still unsure whether I should adopt interators instead of simply allocating and returning slices for some functions, but I’m considering it. The main reason would be performance, but it could be qualified as premature in the cases I’m dealing with in Windigo.

Static linking of the C runtime in Rust

By default, Rust on Windows with MSVC toolchain compiles to a dynamically linked C runtime, apparently following the default configuration on Visual Studio, which uses the /MD compiler flag. In order to use static linking for the C runtime, we must change this to /MT, something I’m used to do in my C++ Visual Studio projects.

I found notes about Rust linkage, which hints us specifically about these /MD and /MT switches, although not citing them explicitly. The way to specify static linking is through RUSTFLAGS environment variable:

RUSTFLAGS='-C target-feature=+crt-static' cargo build --release --target x86_64-pc-windows-msvc

Which is rather ugly, let me say. At least it appears to work, and this is the command line I’m using for my release builds now.