Rust is a systems programming language that aims to provide memory safety, performance, and concurrency. It achieves this through a combination of features such as ownership, borrowing, and lifetimes, which allow it to enforce memory safety at compile time without needing a garbage collector. This makes Rust particularly suitable for performance-critical applications and systems programming, where manual memory management is typically required. Rust’s zero-cost abstractions promises that high-level features do not incur runtime overhead, further enhancing its performance. The language’s concurrency model is designed to be safe and efficient, making it easier to write concurrent code without the common pitfalls of data races.
SWIG is a wrapper generator that is able to connect compiled libraries to a bunch of scripting languages. The process is mostly automatic, but to tackle some corner cases, you have to help the generator do the right thing. In my library, all functions would return an integer, which is an error code. A special function, following the same behavior as strerror_r, can be used to retrieve the meaning of a special error code. This is a pretty usual mechanism for C code. But that’s not the way scripting languages work. In their world, functions are rather supposed to raise exceptions.
Last week, I was preparing a data analysis report using Jupyter, Pandas and Matplotlib (to only quote a few bricks of this wonderful framework). One of the figures had two subplots, the second being an enlargement of a region of the first. To make it obvious, and at the same time show the old MATLAB Fanclub how so 90 they were, I decided to put an arrow from the first to the second subplot.