miniblog.

Igalia's post on self-hosting CI runners is a masterclass in build engineering. It shows dealing with weird API constraints, but still finding good designs. I also learnt that some CI systems use OCR on Apple's installers to automate!

It took me way too long to realise that Arc<Mutex<T>> is basically a way to create multiple &mut T references (with runtime constraints). This means that you can use plain &T and &mut T in the vast majority of your code. Most code doesn't need to care there's a mutex.

I've really come to appreciate OCaml's notion of generics. It doesn't have subtyping, so e.g. you have an `int list` or an arbitrary `'a list`, but nothing inbetween. As soon as you add constraints like Java's `List<? as Foo>` it become incredibly hard to produce good errors.