Peeking Behind Zig Interfaces by Creating a Dummy std.Random Implementation

If you look at my httpz library, you'll notice that httpz.Server(T) is a generic. The type passed to Server serves two purposes. The first is to support an application-specific context - whatever instance of T passed into Server(T).init gets passed back to your custom HTTP handlers. But the other purpose of T is to act as a configuration object....

In an older post, we explored Zig's @ptrCast and then looked at a concrete usage in the shape of std.heap.MemoryPool. @ptrCast As a brief recap, when we use @ptrCast, we're telling the compiler to treat a pointer as a given type. For example, this code runs fine: const std = @import("std"); pub fn main() !void { var user = User{.power = 9001,...

Software developers are often evaluated based on how well they understand specific ideas and tools. While mastery is important, there's another type of knowledge I find myself relying on: vague awareness. Unlike mastery, awareness is merely knowing that something exists along with a basic understanding of what it is and what problem it can solve....

First, the code: std.mem.sort([]const u8, values, {}, stringLessThan); fn stringLessThan(_: void, lhs: []const u8, rhs: []const u8) bool { return std.mem.order(u8, lhs, rhs) == .lt; } std.mem.sort takes 4 arguments: the type of value we're sorting, the list of values to sort, an arbitrary context, and a function. The last argument, the...

If I asked you to respond to an HTTP request with a JSON serialize list of products, somewhere in your code, you'd probably have (or whatever the equivalent is in your stack): body, err := json.Marshal(products) There's an alternative to this approach that I'm rather fond of: gluing pre-serialized JSON pieces together: if (len(productJSON)) == 0...