It's a bit disappointing that a relatively new language like Rust doesn't handle these correctly.

There's no value in a String type if it doesn't behave for text. One can simply use a "Array<char>" to convey proper semantic meaning.

It's not about reversing, but about checking whether reverse iteration works. This is required to perform proper truncation (for limited length fields) as well as visual editing for a cursor to go through the text.

It can additionally be an indication as to whether regular expression matching works, though that is usually handled by a library, and not the core string types.

My contention was always that if a "string" does not reverse text, then it's no better than an "array<char>". The existence of a "string" type implies it should do more.

It'll probably help in this case since I suspect it's computational overhead introducing the bottleneck, nothing architectural.

Alas, I might have to wait, as I tend to use Python 3.8 and it's not supported yet -- though mainly I use it for types, it might actually run in 3.7

I intend on adding WebRTC as a channel for higher volume discarble messages, such as the cursor position of all players.

I agree. General purpose pattern matching in both expressions and function dispatch is a great feature.

Great!

The second issue is a bit of a judgment call too, I think. If the types were inferred you could end up with errors that you're not able to see because inferred types end up compatible. Personally, I think I'd rather write them manually so that I'm validating whether the method actually matches what it was intended to return.

I can't find a more authoritative source right now, but I also remember seeing the same thing that this SO answer says - that it was a deliberate choice not to do this so that people could incrementally add type annotations: https://stackoverflow.com/a/38775381

There are also some separate tools that can infer and generate the annotations for you. I haven't tried them personally, but the mypy docs recommends MonkeyType: https://mypy.readthedocs.io/en/stable/existing_code.html#aut...

I do not have a good reason. A lot of my recent stuff isn't technical, so it's only on the Medium pages. I guess I tend to post those links often now.

I chose LLVM from the start since I knew some of the challenges that interested me couldn't be done at the C level -- or rather it'd be more complicated at that level than at the LLVM level.

Which challenges? As far as I can see, LLVM is essentially C in SSA syntax; what semantic differences have you come across?

Thank you.

I have a lot of respect for you and what you did. Thanks for being inspiring and good luck with whatever you work on next.

When I started Leaf it was to scratch an itch. It was really only when the motivation dropped that I tried to find ways to use it, to renew my interest in pursuing it.