For me, the reason is simply that I like having a blog. Truth be told, I have no readers. I only post once in a blue moon, or whenever inspiration strikes, so that's to be expected.
A good blog can surely lead to all of what you're mentioning, but personally I wouldn't get into blogging with high expectations of any such benefit.
I've found Go to be much simpler than Rust, especially syntax wise. However, in Rust you can use the ? operator which propagates errors. In Go you have to check err != nil.
I've been reading Command-Line Rust[1], and I think it's nice. Each chapter has a challenge where you build a common command-line tool, like echo, cat, head, wc, etc.
Just like you, I do prefer the "learn while you build" approach. My personal experience has been that the book is a nice addition to reference-style books, such as the one you mentioned.
My experience was similar. I tried Factorio once, and gave up because it was very tedious, and too much work to consider it fun. I would have liked to enjoy it, but it's not for everyone.
Interesting. I don't code in C for a living, and I wasn't familiar with strict aliasing -- thanks for sharing your thoughts.
> Can't do that either I'm afraid for much the same reason, need to memcpy over the memory and trust the compiler to elide said copy
Would this apply even to mmap-ed memory? Especially for the bit you're quoting, I guess it can be fixed with a union (or even by using the same struct for both purposes). But since the TAlloc_malloc function returns a pointer to void *, to a location in memory that hasn't been used for any other purposes, perhaps this isn't a violation?
On another note, I was playing around a bit with strict aliasing rules, and oddly enough, the compiler that ships with Monterey (ARM mac) shows no warnings even for code that violates the rules blatantly. Same code threw a warning with GCC (I used an online compiler).
The memory allocator I wrote doesn't throw any warnings using GCC either, but I guess that doesn't mean much.
A good blog can surely lead to all of what you're mentioning, but personally I wouldn't get into blogging with high expectations of any such benefit.
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