sunshowers

Mirrored from the canonical version on the Oxide blog.

There’s recently been some discussion about the benefits and downsides of lock (mutex) poisoning in Rust, spurred by a recent proposal to make the default mutex non-poisoned, i.e. silently unlock on panic (see also, recent discussion on Hacker News).

A few weeks ago at Oxide, we encountered a bug where a particular, somewhat large, data structure was erroring on serialization to JSON via serde.

This is an edited, written version of my RustConf 2025 talk about cancellations in async Rust.

Content note for anti-trans, scientifically illiterate nonsense.

In programming pedagogy, monads have a place as a mystical object from the functional programming world that’s hard to understand and even harder to explain.

There’s absolutely no brand-new insight in this post.

I’m often asked why the Rust test runner I maintain, cargo-nextest, runs every test in a separate process.

RustConf 2024 is next week, so I thought I’d put up a written version of my RustConf 2023 talk about signals in time for that.

At Oxide, we use Helios as the base OS for the cloud computers we sell.

As of this writing, it appears that another open-source project lead has rejected a proposal to replace gendered he language with they, citing vague concerns about “politics.”

Introduction One of the coolest features of AMD’s Ryzen desktop CPUs, and historically a great reason to get them over the competition, was the official support for error-corrected memory (ECC RAM)1.

I used to use this as a place to write long-form thoughts, but with the demise of Twitter I want to also write short-form posts here under the #shorts tag.

1.

Type systems are tools for modeling some aspect of reality.

I’m going to try and write up a post about my digital tools at the end of every year.

Title page of The Social Contract, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

People tend to have lots of opinions about software dependencies.