Just a quick note that the October 2018 office hour slots are now posted. If you’re having a problem with Rust, or have something you’d like to talk out, please sign up!

This is a report on the second “office hours”, in which we discussed how to setup a series of services or actors that communicate with one another. This is a classic kind of problem in Rust: how to deal with cyclic data. Usually, the answer is that the cycle is not necessary (as in this case).

The setup

To start, let’s imagine that we were working in a GC’d language, like JavaScript. We want to have various “services”, each represented by an object. These services may need to communicate with one another, so we also create a directory, which stores pointers to all the services. As each service is created, they add themselves to the directory; when it’s all setup, each service can access all other services. The setup might look something like this:

This is a report on the first “office hours”, in which we discussed debugging Rust programs with gdb. I’m very grateful to Ramana Venkata for suggesting the topic, and to Tom Tromey, who joined in. (Tom has been doing a lot of the work of integrating rustc into gdb and lldb lately.)

This blog post is just going to be a quick summary of the basic workflow of using Rust with gdb on the command line. I’m assuming you are using Linux here, since I think otherwise you would prefer a different debugger. There are probably also nifty graphical tools you can use and maybe even IDE integrations, I’m not sure.

Hello, all! Beginning this Friday (in two days)¹, I’m going to start an experiment that I call Rust office hours. The idea is simple: I’ve set aside a few slots per week to help people work through problems they are having learning or using Rust. My goal here is both to be of service but also to gain more insight into the kinds of things people have trouble with. No problem is too big or too small!²