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Adam Chalmers

Video: My VM and its time-travelling debugger

My work at Zoo has recently focused on KCL, our CAD programming language. Currently our modeling app uses a tree-walk interpreter, but for various reasons we've been exploring a proper compiler instead. I've been developing the compiler, called Grackle. It compiles to a bytecode VM (i.e. an abstract machine), called the KCVM. I gave a 10-minute presentation about KCVM and its time-travelling debugger at a tech talk in Austin recently. Here's the recording!

Thanks very much to Jam.dev for hosting the event!

Free users are incredible

Cloudflare has a really generous free tier, and it gets a lot of free users. I often see comments on Hacker News saying "Cloudflare must be doing something shady, so many people use it for free, and if you're not the customer, then you're the product". This is mostly wrong -- Cloudflare gets a lot of value from its free users, in normal, not-shady ways. Here's why it's helpful to have a ton of free users.

Video: Error handling

The fourth Rust Club video is up! Every Monday I teach Rust to my coworkers at zoo.dev on video chat. We record the call and put it on YouTube so you can learn too. This week's video is about different ways to handle errors in Rust -- when should you panic and when should you return a Result::Err? And what type should that Result::Err be?

Apologies for the low video quality, starting from next episode we used a better-quality recording system.

Video: Analyzing performance

KittyCAD's third Rust Club video is up! We analyze how fast the demo parser from my [first video][/winnow-basics] is, and find ways to speed it up. We use benchmarks to measure its speed, and flamegraphs to visualize its runtime, to find places we can improve.

Apologies for the low video quality, I didn't know we'd be releasing this to YouTube, so it's just using Zoom's "record screen" feature. Starting from episode 5 we used a better-quality recording system.

Investigating crazy compile times

I hate long compiles. I spend hours of my time trying to reduce minutes of compile-time. I recently noticed that the KittyCAD Rust API client was taking an incredibly long time to compile in release mode. Weirdly, the compile time in debug mode was totally fine. I managed to shrink the release compile-times from 33 minutes to 1.5 minutes. Here's how.

Video: Parsing a programming language

KittyCAD's second Rust Club video is up! My [first video][/winnow-basics] covered the Winnow library for parsing text. Today's video shows you a real-world parser example. I'm working on the KittyCAD language (KCL) for designing CAD models, and this reviews the tokenizer and parser I wrote recently.

Apologies for the low video quality, I didn't know we'd be releasing this to YouTube, so it's just using Zoom's "record screen" feature. Starting from episode 5 we used a better-quality recording system.

Video: Parsing text with Winnow

I work at KittyCAD, and every Monday I teach Rust to my coworkers for an hour. We always record them, so that over time we build up an archive of Rust learning videos. Recently I realized we should put some of them on the internet, because other programmers outside KittyCAD might find them helpful too!

This is our first episode, and it's about building parsers with Winnow, a new fork of Nom. I'm a big fan of Nom, and I've written about it a lot. I've been interested in Winnow since it was announced, so here's an hour-long explanation of how to use Winnow.

Apologies for the low video quality, I didn't know we'd be releasing this to YouTube, so it's just using Zoom's "record screen" feature. Future episodes should have higher video quality!