Plurrrr

Wed 18 Jan 2023

Rust concepts I wish I learned earlier

This blog post is meant to cover my experience going down the Rust rabbit hole and tips I wish some learning resources could have taught better. Personally, I cannot learn a new language from simply watching youtube videos, but rather through seeking out solutions for myself, making mistakes, and feeling humbled by the process.

Source: Rust concepts I wish I learned earlier, an article by Raul Jordan.

How to avoid bounds checks in Rust (without unsafe!)

You can often hear online that indexing into a slice, such as my_slice[i] is slow in Rust and you should do something else instead for performance.

The details, however, are murky. There’s little in the way of benchmarks, and hardly any documentation on removing this overhead without resorting to unsafe code.

So after optimizing a bunch of high-profile crates by removing bounds checks (and also removing unsafe code from some of them), I figured I should write down the results, and the techniques I discovered.

Source: How to avoid bounds checks in Rust (without unsafe!), an article by Sergey "Shnatsel" Davidoff.

Symmetric encryption

Symmetric encryption is widely used today, and there are efficient algorithms, some even implemented on hardware. Examples of symmetric encryption algorithms are AES (Advanced Encryption Standard), 3DES, ChaCha, Salsa, Twofish, Blowfish, and Serpent. In this type of encryption, we use the same key to encrypt and decrypt messages (therefore, if someone can send encrypted messages, he can decrypt them as well).

Source: Symmetric encryption, an article by Diego Kingston.