Category Archives: Software

tcpproxy 0.4 released

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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Image courtesy of Hack A Day

This blog post was a bit delayed in the pipeline, but a new release of tcproxy, our educational async (tokio) rust command line proxy project, is now available for download (precompiled binaries or install via cargo).

I was actually surprised to find that we haven’t written about tcpproxy before (you can see our other rust-related posts here), but it’s a command line tcp proxy “server” written with two purposes in mind: a) serving as a real-world example of an async (tokio-based) rust networking project, and b) serving as a minimal but-still-useful tcp proxy you can run and use directly from the command line, without needing complex installation or configuration procedures. (You can think of it as being like Minix, but for rust and async networking.)

The tcpproxy project has been around for quite some time, originally published in 2017 before rust’s async support was even stabilized. At the time, it manually chained futures to achieve scalability without relying on the thread-per-connection model – but today its codebase is a lot easier to follow and understand thanks to rust’s first-class async/await support.

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CallerArgumentExpression and extension methods don’t mix

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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This post is for the C# developers out there and takes a look at the interesting conjunction of [CallerArgumentExpression] and static extension methods – a mix that at first seems too convenient to pass up.

A quick recap: [CallerArgumentExpression] landed as part of the C# 10.0 language update and helps to reduce the (often brittle!) boilerplate involved in, among other uses, creating useful error messages capturing the names of variables or the text of expressions. You tag an optional string method parameter with [CallerArgumentExpression("argName")] where argName is the name of the method argument you want stringified, and the compiler does the rest.

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Implementing truly safe semaphores in rust

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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Discuss this article on r/rust or on Hacker News.

Low-level or systems programming languages generally strive to provide libraries and interfaces that enable developers, boost productivity, enhance safety, provide resistance to misuse, and more — all while trying to reduce the runtime cost of such initiatives. Strong type systems turn runtime safety/sanity checks into compile-time errors, optimizing compilers try to reduce an enforced sequence of api calls into a single instruction, and library developers think up of clever hacks to even completely erase any trace of an abstraction from the resulting binaries. And as anyone that’s familiar with them can tell you, the rust programming language and its developers/community have truly embraced this ethos of zero-cost abstractions, perhaps more so than any others.

I’m not going to go into detail about what the rust language and standard library do to enable zero-cost abstractions or spend a lot of time going over some of the many examples of zero-cost interfaces available to rust programmers, though I’ll just quickly mention a few of my favorites: iterators and all the methods the Iterator trait exposes have to be at the top of every list given the amount of black magic voodoo the compiler has to do to turn these into their loop-based equivalents, zero-sized types make developing embedded firmware in rust a dream and it’s really crazy to see how all the various peripheral abstractions can be completely erased giving you small firmware blobs despite all the safety abstractions, and no list is complete the newest member of the team, async/await and how rust manages to turn an entire web server api into a single state machine and event loop. (And to think this can be used even on embedded without a relatively heavy async framework like tokio and with even zero allocations to boot!)

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SecureStore 0.100: KISS, git-versioned secrets management for rust

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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A few days ago, we published a new version of both the securestore library/crate and the ssclient CLI used to create, manage, and retrieve secrets from SecureStore vaults, an open and cross-language protocol for KISS secrets management. SecureStore vaults provide a more secure and far more reliable solution to storing secrets in environment variables and a simpler and less error prone alternative to network-based secrets management solutions, and make setting up development environments a breeze.

For some background, the SecureStore protocol (first published in 2017) is an open specification and cross-language library/frontend for securely storing encrypted secrets versioned in git, alongside your code. We have implementations available in rust (crate, cli) and for C#/.NET (api and cli, nuget) and the specification is purposely designed to be both easy-to-use and easy-to-port to other languages or frameworks.

This is the first update with (minor) breaking changes to the securestore public api, although pains have been taken to ensure that most common workflows won’t break. The changes are primarily to improve ergonomics when retrieving secrets from rust, and come with completely rewritten docs and READMEs (for the project, the lib, and the cli).

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C# file size formatting library PrettySize 3.1 released

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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PrettySizeHot on the heels of an update to our rust port of PrettySize we have a new release of PrettySize.NET that brings new features and capabilities to the best .NET library for formatting file sizes for human-readable output and display.

PrettySize 3.1, available on GitHub and via Nuget, has just been released and contains a number of improvements and requested features and newfound abilities to make handling file sizes (and not just formatting them) easier and more enjoyable.

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PrettySize 0.3 release and a weakness in rust’s type system

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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PrettySizeI’m happy to announce that a new version of size, the PrettySize.NET port for rust, has been released and includes a number of highly requested features and improvements.

The last major release of the size crate was 0.1.2, released in December of 2018. It was feature complete with regards to its original purpose: the (automatic) textual formatting of file sizes for human-readable printing/display purposes. It would automatically take a file size, pick the appropriate unit (KB, MB, GB, etc) to display the final result in, and choose a suitable precision for the floating numeric component. It had support for both base-10 (KB, MB, GB, etc) and base-2 (KiB, MiB, GiB, etc) types, and the user could choose between them as well as override how the unit was formatted. In short, it did one thing and did it right.

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Free Windows 11 Repair and Recovery Tool Download

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Download Windows 11 repair utility for free

NeoSmart Technologies is pleased to announce the immediate availability of the latest additions to its Easy Recovery Essentials™ for Windows line of bootable repair and recovery tools for Microsoft Windows: EasyRE for Windows 11 and EasyRE Pro for Windows 11. Continuing a tradition that started with Windows 10, our Windows 11 boot recovery USB is currently available as a completely free download for anyone that needs to fix their Windows 11 installation after a virus infection or a Windows Update gone wrong.

EasyRE is fully compatible with the latest generation of EFI PCs and fixes everything from the original Windows 11 release to problems with the latest Windows 11 22H2 release and beyond.

EasyRE for Windows 11 is probably the easiest and most reliable way to fix BCD boot errors, blue screens during Windows boot, startup errors, EFI bootloader problems, MBR issues and more. You can download EasyRE for Windows 11 for free today, and use it to create a bootable Windows repair USB with the free Easy USB Creator or create a free Windows recovery CD if you prefer that route instead. You just download EasyRE on any working PC, convert the ISO image download to a USB or CD with one of our free tools, then place it in the computer that needs repair and restart it, choosing to boot from the EasyRE CD or USB, and wait for it to load the main menu:

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Microsoft bids adieu to Windows Phone in new emoji

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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Windows 11 is here and it comes with a new version of Segoe UI Emoji, the font that’s used across the OS to render various emoji from Unicode codepoint sequences to the emoji you see on screen (developers: use Unicode.NET for your emoji needs!). With it, a number of emoji icons have been upgraded to a new look: some to mirror the connotations and semantics of other emoji fonts, others to be less disparaging. But there’s a less welcome surprise too, for those four… maybe five? of us that still remember the ill-fated Windows Phone fondly.

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Using SIMD acceleration in rust to create the world’s fastest tac

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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NeoSmart Technologies’ open source (MIT-licensed), cross-platform tac (written in rust) has been updated to version 2.0 (GitHub link). This is a major release with enormous performance improvements under-the-hood, primarily featuring handwritten SIMD acceleration of the core logic that allows it to process input up to three times faster than its GNU Coreutils counterpart. (For those that aren’t familiar with it, tac is a command-line utility to reverse the contents of a file.)

This release has been a long time in the making. I had the initial idea of utilizing vectorized instructions to speed up the core line ending search logic during the initial development of tac in 2017, but was put off by the complete lack of stabilized SIMD support in rust at the time. In 2019, after attempting to process a few log files – each of which were over 100 GiB – I decided to revisit the subject and implemented a proof-of-concept shortly thereafter… and that’s when things stalled for a number of reasons.

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