After some incremental progress in our Letter Boxed solver, we’re now ready to complete the app. Our hard-won “expertise” in Rust now makes the last several steps largely mechanical. The first set of changes produces LetterBox and Vertices structs, so…
Letter Boxed: Rust impl, part 3 (modules, trie, I/O)
Our Rust-based Letter Boxed code so far has just the core character-based data types. Today we’ll add the trie. Before we move on, we need to keep our house in order. Rather than have one massive lib.rs file, we should…
Letter Boxed: Rust impl, part 2 (panicking, hashing, parsing)
Previously we began our Rust exploration of Letter Boxed with the core St and Ch structs. Now we’ll complete their functionality. The next test on our TODO list looks like this in the C# version: We’ve already encountered our first…
Letter Boxed: Rust impl, part 1 (basics)
We’ve already set up the development environment, so let’s write some Rust code! A good place to start is with the bottom layer data structures, known as Str and Ch in the C# version. To review, Ch is an enumeration…
Letter Boxed: introducing Rust!
In the ongoing Letter Boxed solver saga, we have explored native code from the C++ angle. After all, C++ is still comfortably among the top of the close-to-the-metal programming languages (at least according to some sources). But it’s 2021 AD…
Letter Boxed: out with the old
Software rot is inevitable if projects are not maintained with care. It is nice to think that in today’s write once, run anywhere world, a rock-solid application with no planned changes can continue to work perhaps without even recompiling; of…
Cross-platform without complexity: finishing up
Our cross-platform project has interoperable C++ and .NET code. However, the command line and IDE experience still only accounts for the C++ side. Let’s start with the IDE. First, a bit of bad news — there doesn’t seem to be…
Cross-platform without complexity: .NET interop
The cross-platform project has a shared library now. Wouldn’t it be fun to try to build an interop project using P/Invoke with this library? To account for the addition of .NET projects, we’ll need to revisit the project structure: inc…
Cross-platform without complexity: shared libraries
Continuing from our cross-platform project skeleton, let’s try to add a shared library. Windows users may know these as dynamic link libraries (DLLs), while Linux users would recognize them as shared objects (.so). To make things even trickier, most Windows…
Cross-platform without complexity: command line
At this point we have a Windows build and remote Linux build working from Windows in the Visual Studio IDE. This is all good and it’s hard to beat VS in terms of productivity while actively developing the code. However,…