mmc

The Only Good Indians

2026-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Description</a></h2>
Ten years ago outside Browning, Montana, four Blackfeet shot some elk, and then went on with their lives. It happens every year, it’s been happening forever, it’s the way it’s always been. But this time it’s different.
Ten years after that fateful hunt, these men are being stalked, are being hunted themselves. By who? By . . . what? And why?
Some hunting expeditions, they’re never really over.
This one’s just beginning.

The Secret History

2026-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Review coming soon …

Ownership, Lifetimes, and the Cost of Abstractions in Rust

2026-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Placeholder content. This is not original work. This article is a stand-in used to demonstrate Markdown rendering, layout, and typography in a Zola-based site. Content is fictional and for structural testing only. </blockquote>
Most languages ask you to trust the programmer. C gives you a raw pointer and wishes you luck. Python wraps everything in a garbage collector and hopes the overhead is acceptable. Rust takes a different position entirely: it asks you to prove, at compile time, that your program is correct with respect to memory. The compiler is not a tool you use — it is a collaborator that refuses to ship until you’ve convinced it.
This piece walks through the core ideas — ownership, borrowing, and lifetimes — and examines the trade-offs honestly. Rust is not free. The borrow checker has a learning curve with real friction. Whether that friction is worth it depends entirely on what you are building.
Ownership as a first-class concept</a></h2>
In Rust, every value has exactly one owner. When that owner goes out of scope, the value is dropped — memory freed, destructors run, handles closed. There is no garbage collector sweeping through at some undefined future moment. The moment a binding leaves scope, cleanup happens.
Consider a simple example:
// s1 owns the string let s1 = String::from("hello"); // ownership moves to s2; s1 is no longer valid let s2 = s1; // this line would not compile: // println!("{}", s1);</code></pre> The compiler tracks this statically. You do not discover the bug at runtime in production — you discover it while writing the code. This is the central promise of Rust.
Borrowing without giving up ownership</a></h2>
Moving ownership everywhere would be impractical. Rust provides borrowing as the alternative: you can lend a reference to a value without transferring ownership. References come in two flavors — shared and mutable — and the compiler enforces that they never coexist.
fn length(s: &String) -> usize { s.len() } let s = String::from("world"); let n = length(&s); // s is still valid here println!("s={}, len={}", s, n);</code></pre> The rule — one mutable reference or many shared references, never both — eliminates data races by construction. No mutex required for the cases the type system can see at compile time.
What lifetimes actually are</a></h2>
Lifetimes are annotations that tell the compiler how long a reference is valid relative to other references. Most of the time, lifetime elision rules handle this automatically. When you write a function that returns a reference derived from its inputs, you may need to be explicit.
// 'a says: the returned reference lives as long as both inputs fn longest<'a>(x: &'a str, y: &'a str) -> &'a str { if x.len() > y.len() { x } else { y } }</code></pre> Lifetime annotations do not change how long values live — they only describe relationships that already exist. The compiler uses them to verify that no reference outlives the data it points to.
The honest cost</a></h2>
None of this is free. The borrow checker rejects valid programs that it cannot prove are safe. Self-referential data structures require workarounds. Certain patterns that are trivial in other languages require rethinking from scratch in Rust.
For applications where correctness and performance both matter — systems programming, network daemons, parsers, embedded targets — the compile-time guarantees pay out. For a quick script or a data pipeline where Python works fine, the overhead of fighting the borrow checker is real cost with limited return.
Rust rewards the programmer who thinks carefully about data ownership before writing code. If that matches how you already think, the friction evaporates quickly. If you are accustomed to reaching for Arc<Mutex<T>></code> on everything and sorting out ownership later, expect a steeper adjustment.

mmclinton.pages.dev 2026-06-10T00:00:00+00:00 About</a></h2> This website. A Zola static site, reproducible through a Nix flake, deployed to Cloudflare Pages from Codeberg. Math is prerendered with KaTeX, code highlighting follows the theme toggle, and the only client JavaScript is a theme switch and a small constellation canvas. See the colophon</a> for the full rundown. Hello, World! 2026-06-07T00:00:00+00:00 A comprehensive demonstration of standard Markdown features. </blockquote> Headings</a></h2> H1 — Page Title</a></h1> H2 — Major Section</a></h2> H3 — Subsection</a></h3> H4 — Sub-subsection</a></h4> H5 — Minor heading</a></h5> H6 — Smallest heading</a></h6> Emphasis</a></h2> Plain text, bold text, italic text, bold and italic, and strikethrough</del>. You can also use inline code</code> to highlight short snippets. Lists</a></h2> Unordered</a></h3> Item one</li> Item two Nested item A</li> Nested item B Deeply nested item</li> </ul> </li> </ul> </li> Item three</li> </ul> Ordered</a></h3> First step</li> Second step Sub-step one</li> Sub-step two</li> </ol> </li> Third step</li> </ol> Links & Images</a></h2> OpenStreetMap</a> — an inline link. Anthropic</a> — a reference-style link. Code</a></h2> Inline</a></h3> Use println!("Hello, World!")</code> to print in Rust. Fenced Block (Rust)</a></h3> fn main() { let greeting = "Hello, World!"; println!("{}", greeting); }</code></pre>Fenced Block (Python)</a></h3> def greet(name: str) -> str: return f"Hello, {name}!" if __name__ == "__main__": print(greet("World"))</code></pre>Fenced Block (Shell)</a></h3> echo "Hello, World!"</code></pre> Tables</a></h2> Language</th> Paradigm</th> Typing</th> First Appeared</th></tr></thead> Rust</td> Multi-paradigm</td> Static</td> 2010</td></tr> Python</td> Multi-paradigm</td> Dynamic</td> 1991</td></tr> Go</td> Concurrent</td> Static</td> 2009</td></tr> SQL</td> Declarative</td> Static</td> 1974</td></tr> </tbody></table> Column alignment can be controlled with colons in the separator row: </blockquote> Left-aligned</th> Centered</th> Right-aligned</th></tr></thead> Apple</td> Banana</td> Cherry</td></tr> 1</td> 2</td> 3</td></tr> </tbody></table> Blockquotes</a></h2> “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” — F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit </blockquote> Nested blockquotes: Outer quote. Inner quote nested one level. Inner quote nested two levels. </blockquote> </blockquote> </blockquote> Horizontal Rules</a></h2> Three or more hyphens, asterisks, or underscores on their own line: Task Lists</a></h2> Write the Hello World template</li> Include code blocks</li> Add a table</li> Render it in a Markdown viewer</li> Extend with project-specific content</li> </ul> Footnotes</a></h2> Standard Markdown footnotes1</a> are supported in many renderers such as GitHub and Pandoc.2</a> ^{1 This is the first footnote. It can contain formatted text and even code</code>. </div>}^{2 Pandoc is a universal document converter — handy for converting .md</code> to PDF, DOCX, and more. </div>}Escaping Special Characters</a></h2> Use a backslash to escape Markdown syntax: *not italic*, `not code`, [not a link]. HTML (where supported)</a></h2> Click to expand a hidden section</summary> Raw HTML can be embedded in Markdown where the renderer allows it. Useful for collapsible sections, colored text, or custom layouts. </details> End of template. Happy writing! Dune 2026-05-20T00:00:00+00:00 Review coming soon … Project Hail Mary 2026-04-02T00:00:00+00:00 Review coming soon … gitaid.nvim 2026-03-10T00:00:00+00:00 About</a></h2> A small, idiomatic Neovim plugin that displays the output of git status --short</code> in a floating popup. Why</a></h2> The porcelain is powerful but the muscle memory is brutal. gitaid</code> trades a few flags for verbs. spectral 2026-02-18T00:00:00+00:00 About</a></h2> A real-time audio noise suppression application powered by RNNoise</a>, a hybid DSP and neural-network-based noise suppression system originally developed by Xiph.org. Status</a></h2> Functional on Linux via PipeWire. The application consists of a GUI (spectral</code>) and a background daemon (spectral-daemon</code>) that handles audio processing. saw 2026-01-12T00:00:00+00:00 About</a></h2> A terminal-first workbench for running static analysis on a repository: discover the available analyzers for your language, run them, and review normalized findings in one place. Built in Rust, language by language. Status</a></h2> Early development (the Ratatui TUI is a three-tab workbench — home, analysis, tools — that triggers analyzer runs interactively).

Dune

Project Hail Mary

gitaid.nvim

About</a></h2>
A small, idiomatic Neovim plugin that displays the output of `git status --short</code> in a floating popup.</p>`
`Why</a></h2> The porcelain is powerful but the muscle memory is brutal. gitaid</code> trades a few flags for verbs.</p>`

`Why</a></h2> The porcelain is powerful but the muscle memory is brutal. gitaid</code> trades a few flags for verbs.</p>`

spectral

About</a></h2>
A real-time audio noise suppression application powered by RNNoise</a>, a hybid DSP and neural-network-based noise suppression system originally developed by Xiph.org.</p>

Status</a></h2>
Functional on Linux via PipeWire. The application consists of a GUI (`spectral</code>) and a background daemon (spectral-daemon</code>) that handles audio processing.</p>`

saw

Status</a></h2>
Early development (the Ratatui TUI is a three-tab workbench — home, analysis, tools — that triggers analyzer runs interactively).</p>

mmc

The Only Good Indians

The Secret History

Ownership, Lifetimes, and the Cost of Abstractions in Rust

mmclinton.pages.dev

Hello, World!