Things I read, Week 8

This post is part of a new experiment this year: Trying to briefly collect articles/posts/code/documentation I read in the past week and add some comments for things I consider important.

Blog post: Freedom From the Box

A transcript of a talk by Sarah Groff Hennigh-Palermo, in which she describes why she really disliked types in programming languages. The talk is obviously strongly worded. She gives 6 reasons why she favors another approach to programming. I disagree with most of her points though, and not only because I'm working in a language with a lot of types. I have the feeling that some of her approaches around this are types-just-differently-encoded. She's also advocating for null. Nonetheless an interesting read and a different perspective.

Blog post series: A Minimal Rust Kernel

Philipp Oppermann is back with his second edition of "Writing an OS in Rust"¹. It's far from finished and goes a slightly different way than the first edition. Gone is writing the assembly to actually boot your OS, instead using an existing bootloader and focusing more on the operting system itself.

Blog post: Picking Apart the Crashing iOS String

Manish dives deep into the latest iOS crash bug involving a unsuspicious looking sequence of Telugu characters. Turns out there are quite a few combinations of characters causing the crash. He didn't find why it's happening though. And if you're on iOS: there's an iOS upgrade available now, install it.