Parsing Rust Strings into Slices

Updated 8/23/19: Chad Dougherty found a bug in my example code under “The Better Way”, below; I’ve modified and extended the post to discuss the issue and added another way to solve it.

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The MoltResult Type

Rust provides the standard Result<T,E> type for returning values from functions or methods that might need to include error info or the like. C has no such thing; and so the C implementation of Tcl has to jump through some hoops. I’m going to describe how Standard Tcl does it, and then how I’ve implemented the same pattern in Rust.

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The Molt Book

The Molt Book is now on-line. The Book is (in proper Rust fashion) the user’s guide for Molt and its related crates. It describes both the Molt command-line tools and the language itself, including all differences from Standard Tcl.

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Anatomy of a Molt Command

Tcl is a sort of a cross between shell languages and LISP, with pretensions to C syntax. As such, the language consists of a collection of commands. A statement in the language is also called a command, and consists of one or more white-space delimited words. For example, the following command appends the string "Some more text" to the variable buffer:

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The Death of Rube Goldberg

I began learning the Rust programming language late in 2018, and as an old C programmer I was immediately impressed by how much simpler and easier it is to configure and build a cross-platform project in Rust than it is in C. I called this post “The Death of Rube Goldberg” because tools like cargo, the Rust build manager, are ultimately going to kill the old C ecosystem of autoconf, configure, make, et al.

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