Posts on kidoni.dev

Vibe Coding a Lox Compiler, Part 0: Background

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Using Claude Code to build a compiler and blog about it"

Vibe Coding a Lox Compiler, Part 1: Introduction & Compilers 101

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

An introduction to the series and a Compilers 101 primer covering tokenization, parsing, ASTs, interpreters, VMs, and native compilation.

Vibe Coding a Lox Compiler, Part 2: Tokenization

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

How vibe-lox turns raw Lox source text into a stream of typed tokens using the winnow parser-combinator library.

Vibe Coding a Lox Compiler, Part 3: Parsing & the Abstract Syntax Tree

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

How vibe-lox turns a flat token stream into a typed Abstract Syntax Tree using a hand-written recursive descent parser.

Vibe Coding a Lox Compiler, Part 4: The Tree-Walk Interpreter

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

How vibe-lox executes Lox programs by walking the AST — including the resolver, scoped environments, closures, and OOP.

Vibe Coding a Lox Compiler, Part 5: The Bytecode VM

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

How vibe-lox compiles Lox to bytecode and executes it on a stack-based virtual machine — roughly 3× faster than tree-walking.

Vibe Coding a Lox Compiler, Part 6: LLVM IR & Native Compilation

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

How vibe-lox compiles Lox to LLVM IR and native executables using the inkwell crate, a C runtime, and LLVM's TargetMachine.

Vibe Coding a Lox Compiler, Part 7: The REPL

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Building an interactive Lox REPL with backslash commands and tab completion using the rustyline crate.

Level Up Your Rust Testing With testcontainers and rstest

Sun, 07 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Leverage the `testcontainers` and `rstest` crates for testing with Rust

Using CodeSnap or nvim-silicon For Screenshots in Neovim

Wed, 19 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Comparing CodeSnap and nvim-silicon as screenshot plugins in Neovim.

Protecting Secrets in Dotfiles with Chezmoi

Fri, 20 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Don't put sensitive details like passwords or API keys in your dotfiles

My Take on Helix and Neovim

Sat, 14 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

How do I like Helix and how does it compare to Neovim at this stage?

Peekable Iterators in Java

Sat, 07 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

an implementation of an iterator allowing peeking ahead.

Using chezmoi part 2 - Templates

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

chezmoi has a robust templating system; let's see how to use it

Quick bytes - using UDP in Rust

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

a simple example using UDP to send and receive data with Rust

What does "kidoni" mean?

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Where did I get "kidoni" from?

Using Java's New Gatherer Interface

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Create new collectors using Java's Gatherer interface, using some Rust methods as examples.

Taking Screenshots in Neovim with Silicon

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Integrating the `silicon` tool with Neovim to take screenshots of code.

Totally Terrific Terminal Tools

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Some tools for terminals can seriously up your programming game.

Using chezmoi to manage dotfiles

Thu, 09 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

how I have set up chezmoi to manage my dotfiles

Learning Git Internals with Rust - Part 6

Mon, 07 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

git tree and commit objects

Learning Git Internals with Rust - Part 5

Sun, 06 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

git ls-tree

Could I Possibly Switch from JetBrains IDEs to Neovim?

Mon, 02 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Is Neovim and IDE on par with JetBrains' IDEs and other GUI IDEs?

Learning Git Internals with Rust - Part 4

Sun, 25 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

git cat-file

Learning Git Internals with Rust - Part 3

Tue, 20 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Rust refactoring

Learning Git Internals with Rust - Part 2

Tue, 30 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Git Objects

Learning Git Internals with Rust

Fri, 26 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

the first in a series on Git internals as a project to learn Rust

Text Parsing in Rust with Nom

Thu, 11 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

using the nom crate for creating parsers in Rust

Using thread locals in Rust

Fri, 14 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

one approach to thread-local data in Rust

Creating a TUI in Rust

Thu, 02 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

using ratatui to create a Rust TUI

Improving your error handling in Rust

Sat, 13 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

tips for better error handling in Rust

Logging in a Rust Application

Sun, 07 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

how to use logging in a Rust application

There's No Such Thing as 'Regression Testing'

Sat, 10 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

How would you define “regression testing”? According to Wikipedia,

Regression testing (rarely non-regression testing[1]) is re-running functional and non-functional tests to ensure that previously developed and tested software still performs after a change.

In the modern age of test automation and continuous integration, tests are run (or should be) automatically by the build system. Whether testing functional or non-functional features, there really are only three categories of tests to run:

Unit tests
Integration tests
System tests

Let’s discuss each in turn.

Building cloud software? Don't forget about this ...

Mon, 22 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

When developers set out to architect a piece of software — whether a brand new green-field project or rearchitecting an existing product — the typical considerations are things like

should I use microservices and how many
how will these microservices communicate
how will data persist
what guarantees must be provided for messages flowing through the system
what’s encrypted, where and when
etc.

Boxes and lines start appearing on whiteboards (physical or virtual) … here are the N microservices, we’ll use gRPC here, we’ll use Kafka there and MongoDb will save everything. We’ll deploy to Kubernetes, set up deployments with HPA, have at least 3 instances so our brain doesn’t get split, and monitor with the EFK stack. Great! Let’s write some code.

How to "group by" using Java Stream API

Fri, 12 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Coding a function like SQL's GROUP BY using Java Stream API

Java's fork-join framework

Thu, 21 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Since Java 7, the JDK includes a set of classes implementing a fork-join pattern. This is an approach decomposing work into multiple tasks that can be executed in parallel. Java provides ForkJoinPool and ForkJoinTask as the two primary classes implementing the approach. This post will cover an example of using these, by converting a Mergesort implementation from a recursive implementation to one using fork-join.

Mergesort is a classic divide-and-conquer approach to sorting. The data to be sorted are split into two halves, and those halves each are split into two until the data can no longer be split. Then the resulting arrays are merged and sorted.

Using Protocol Buffers To Serialize To Off-Heap Memory

Sat, 02 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Protocol buffers can be used to serialize Java objects to off-heap memory.

Using off-heap memory in Java programs

Fri, 01 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

How to use the "native" process heap from a Java program.

Bootiful ksqlDb part 2 --- creating a stream

Thu, 31 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In this post I will explore the ksqlDb API for creating streams. This is the second post about using ksqlDb with Spring Boot. Read the first post here.

A stream in ksqlDb is analogous to a stream in Kafka Streams. One difference is how you create the stream. As described in the first post, a stream in Kafka Streams is created programmatically with an API.

StreamsBuilder streamsBuilder = new StreamsBuilder();
KStream<Integer, Order> ordersStream = streamsBuilder.stream("orders");
ordersStream
    .filter((key, value) -> value.orderType == Electronics)
    .groupByKey()
    .aggregate(() -> 0.0f, (key, value, sum) -> sum += value.orderAmount)
    .toStream()
    .to("output");
Topology topology = streamsBuilder.build();
KafkaStreams kafkaStreams = new KafkaStreams(topology, new Properties());
kafkaStreams.start();

ksqlDb uplevels this to a more familiar SQL syntax. Here’s an example from the ksqlDb quickstart.

Separating integration tests from unit tests

Wed, 30 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Update 2024-12-15 This blog is obviously very OO-centric, focusing on the notion of a class as the smallest “unit”. Obviously, in non-OO languages, what a “unit” is will vary e.g. it could be a compilation unit. But the idea still holds, that you are trying to test individual units of behavior without pulling in dependencies that may result in longer startup time, failures in the dependencies (which may be out of your control), or code that doesn’t exist yet (for TDD).

My Three Must Read Books for the Working Software Developer

Wed, 23 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

some book recommendations for developers

Bootiful ksqlDb

Wed, 25 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In this post I will show how to use the ksqlDb Java REST client to interact with the ksqlDb server using a Spring Boot application as a foundation. The Boot app will also use Spring Webflux to help expand the use of reactive programming. I will also show the use of the Testcontainers framework for integrating deployment of Docker containers as part of integration testing, in this case with JUnit 5.

What this will not cover is details of Apache Kafka or Spring Boot, or even ksqlDb and streaming systems, except to provide background to understand the code. There are plenty of other examples and posts that cover those details.