Julio Merino

Software artist. Writer aficionado. Open source enthusiast. Runner. Father of two.
Currently: Senior Software Engineer at Google, New York City.

  • Rust review: The match keyword

    A commonly-acclaimed feature of Rust is its match keyword: a “conditional on steroids”. match lets you take the value of an expression and compare it against a bunch of values—or, more generally, patterns. As you write and read Rust, you will notice that this keyword is used everywhere because it’s the way to access certain types, like Option values or error codes. For example: matchnode.get_parent(){// node is an Option<Something>. Some(parent)=>{// Do something with "parent", which we know points to a node.

    June 15, 2018 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Rust review: Expressions, expressions, expressions

    Rust resembles a functional language in many ways although it does not claim to be one. In fact, I have been thinking of Rust as a “pragmatic Haskell” or as a “well-balanced mixture between C++ and Haskell“. One of the ways the functional aspects show up is via expressions and how pretty much any construct in Rust can be treated as an expression. But before we begin, a little warning: the examples below are, by no means, idiomatic Rust—I just hope they are simple enough to illustrate what I want to show.

    June 12, 2018 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

  • Rust review: Learning curve

    Writing Rust code is not restricted to programming gurus—but there is no denying that the learning curve is steeper than that of other languages. Or is it? In this post, I’ll try to convince you that the curve does feel steep, but it isn’t when taken into perspective. Let’s first start by stating that learning a language is not the same as learning its syntax. Learning a language involves learning the syntax, of course, but it also involves familiarizing oneself with its common idioms and grabbing a good sense of what the standard libraries provide.

    June 8, 2018 · Continue reading (about 4 minutes) · Comments

  • Rust review: Protect the data

    The one thing that blew my mind about Rust is its approach to data sharing in concurrent situations. I had always thought of mutexes as something that is easy to get wrong and was convinced that the use of a RAII pattern to prevent lock leaks never happen (like with Abseil’s MutexLock) was the panacea. (I’m a fan of RAII in C++ by the way, in case you haven’t noticed.)

    June 5, 2018 · Continue reading (about 5 minutes) · Comments

  • Rust review: The borrow checker

    Aaaah, the borrow checker: the dreaded enemy lurking within the Rust compiler, ready to make its move to bring pain to your life by preventing your code from compiling. Or that’s what everyone seems to say, which is one of the reasons I put off learning Rust for so long. In reality… the borrow checker is a blessing, but it is true that getting past its gates is difficult at first.

    June 1, 2018 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

  • Rust review: Immutable by default

    Let’s start the deep dive by looking into a powerful feature of Rust: all variables and references are immutable by default unless qualified with mut. To understand why this is important, let’s cover some context first. One of my pet peeves when reviewing C++ code is to ask authors to sprinkle the const qualifier everywhere: if something ain’t mutated, say so explicitly. This includes marking local variables, function arguments, function return values, class attributes, etc.

    May 29, 2018 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

  • Rust review: Introduction

    I had been meaning to learn Rust since I first toyed with Go a couple of years ago. During this period, I’ve written a non-trivial amount of Go code both inside and outside Google, but never found the chance to sit back and learn Rust. This changed a month ago during my yearly family trip to Korea. This time around, I decided upfront that I would not work on any personal or work projects for the 2-week long vacation.

    May 25, 2018 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

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