Rust is fairly new multi-paradigm system programming language that claims to offer both high performance and strong safety guarantees, particularly around concurrency and memory allocation. As I play with the language a little, I’m using this series of blog posts to discuss some of its more unique features as I come across them. This one discusses looping constructs and standard library collections.

In this series looking at features introduced by every version of Python 3, we move on to Python 3.9 and examine some of the major new features. These include type hinting generics in standard collections, string methods for stripping specified prefixes and suffixes from strings, extensions to function and variable annotations, and new modules for timezone information and topological sorting of graphs.

In this series looking at features introduced by every version of Python 3, we move on to Python 3.8 and see what new features have been added in this release. These features include assignment as an expression, position-only parameters and two new modules in the standard library.

In this series looking at features introduced by every version of Python 3, we continue our look at the features added in Python 3.6. This second article looks at some more of the new features added to the language added in this release. These include a new secrets module, a new implementation of the dict object and better support for path-like objects.

In this series looking at features introduced by every version of Python 3, this is the fourth looking at Python 3.5. In it we look at the major updates to the standard library which were made in this release. These include various Internet protocol module enhancements, some asyncio features, and some restrictions on regular expression syntax have been lifted.

The second of my two articles covering features added in Python 3.3, this one talks about a large number of changes to the standard library, especially in network and OS modules. I also discuss implicit namespace packages, which are a bit niche but can be useful for maintaining large families of packages.

Another installment in my look at all the new features added to Python in each 3.x release, this one covering 3.2. There’s a lot covered including the argparse module, support for futures, changes to the GIL implementation, SNI support in SSL/TLS, and much more besides. This is my longest article ever by far! If you’re puzzled why I’m looking at releases that are years old, check out the first post in the series.

This article continues to series looking at features added in each release of Python 3.x, with this one covering the move from 3.0 to 3.1. It includes the new contains OrderedDict and Counter, making modules executable as scripts, and marking unit tests as known failures. If you’re puzzled why I’m looking at releases that are years old, check out the first post in the series.

When dealing with data structures that involve hashing, most commonly hash tables, it’s fairly common knowledge that your choice of hash function is an important performance consideration. What’s perhaps less well known is that it can be an important security consideration too - this article briefly discusses why.