After month of waiting1 I have finally received package from GitHub Shop with a bunch of Octocat stickers. Stuck one on my notebook, one on my front door and gave a few to a friends. Pretty cute little things. Definitely, Github has gained so much popularity thanks to mascot.

Octocats

Now for the code. As you may know, recently Rust 0.9 had released. Today I was updating code in my small rosetta repo (solutions for rosettacode) and discover one funny easter egg.

Here is a program for finding the limit of recursion in Rust 0.9 (version for Rust 0.8 differs only by printing line).

fn recurse(n: int) {
    println!("deep: {:d}", n);
    recurse(n + 1);
}
 
fn main() {
    recurse(0);
}

This code has failing with segfault in Rust 0.8 printing last line deep: 7892. Now it aborts on some assertion giving this great message:

deep: 12952

There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life. But some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.

fatal runtime error: assertion failed: !ptr.is_null()

Aborted

Folks from #rust on irc.mozilla.org said that theoretically this code must print something like task '<main>' has overflowed its stack, but overflow probably occurs in println statement, so we have this nice Lovecraft quote instead.

  1. Russian Post especially cool on holidays. ↩