Important note: this article is outdated! Go to http://zsiciarz.github.io/24daysofrust/ for a recent version of all of 24 days of Rust articles. The blogpost here is kept as it is for historical reasons.

We finished part 1 with a working FUSE filesystem representing an empty directory. Today we will continue the story and finally add some files to the mix.

Important note: this article is outdated! Go to http://zsiciarz.github.io/24daysofrust/ for a recent version of all of 24 days of Rust articles. The blogpost here is kept as it is for historical reasons.

A traditional filesystem is typically implemented as a kernel module. However, some Unix-like operating systems (Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X and a few others) allow for userspace filesystems through a mechanism called FUSE. The canonical FUSE library is written in C and there are some bindings from other languages (Python, Ruby etc.)

The fuse crate is very interesting because it's a rewrite from C to Rust, leveraging many of Rust features unavailable in C. The only binding to libfuse is related to mounting and unmounting the filesystem, the rest is pure Rust.

Important note: this article is outdated! Go to http://zsiciarz.github.io/24daysofrust/ for a recent version of all of 24 days of Rust articles. The blogpost here is kept as it is for historical reasons.

The nalgebra crate provides a wide set of mathematical primitives for linear algebra, computer physics, graphic engines etc. I'm not going to dive deep into the underlying math, there are a lot of tutorials and courses, some of them specifically targeted at the programmers. My goal for today is just a brief showcase of what we can do in Rust with nalgebra.

Important note: this article is outdated! Go to http://zsiciarz.github.io/24daysofrust/ for a recent version of all of 24 days of Rust articles. The blogpost here is kept as it is for historical reasons.

Writing the Postgres article reminded me of one more cool thing in PostgreSQL - native support for the UUID type. The popular web framework Django will soon get a UUID field, Rails already support it. So what's the big deal?

Important note: this article is outdated! Go to http://zsiciarz.github.io/24daysofrust/ for a recent version of all of 24 days of Rust articles. The blogpost here is kept as it is for historical reasons.

The image crate is a library under development (well, not unlike the rest of the Rust ecosystem before 1.0) to read, manipulate and write images. It is part of the effort to develop an open source game engine in pure Rust - Piston, but of course the image crate can be used on its own.

At the moment image supports reading and writing JPG and PNG images, while a few other formats are read-only (GIF, TIFF, WEBP).