Fortnightly Programming Q&A Thread

I'm a bit late but there's an oddly specific question I have around Oauth2 or rather the open_id part I think, which I cant seem to find a clear answer on.

When you get an access token and an id_token back from the auth server such as google.
Do you need to use both the access token and the id_token.
Can you validate that the user is logged in with just the id_token?
Or can you only use that one to get information about the user.

So, I want to go through this little tutorial on a full-text search engine and try to convert it to equivalent(ish) Rust code. Very early in, and have gotten to the point where I can decode a gzipped file via (GzDecoder)[https://docs.rs/flate2/1.0.20/flate2/read/struct.GzDecoder.html] ... however, when I use the read_to_string() method as in the example, it seems to until it encounters the end-of-line. The docs for read_to_string() say it should read to the end-of-file, though. So... I'm a little confused as to why it's not reading the entire file. Then again, the file is ~6GB and I'm not sure it could even fit into a Rust String ... 🤔

Anyhow, here's what I got:

pub fn load_documents() -> io::Result<String> {
    let start = Instant::now();
    let f = fs::read("data/enwiki-latest-abstract.xml.gz")?;
    let mut gz = GzDecoder::new(&f[..]);
    let mut s = String::new();
    gz.read_to_string(&mut s)?;

    let end = start.elapsed().as_millis();
    println!("Parsing XML took {} milliseconds.", end);
    Ok(s)
}

Of course, I haven't gotten around to actually trying to implement the parser, yet...

I'm getting stuck on a CSS issue.

• https://apostolique.github.io/apos-docs/hello-world/
• https://apostolique.github.io/apos-docs/other-page/
• https://apostolique.github.io/apos-docs/best-practices/

I have a 3 column layout that has a sidebar, main content and table of content.

My problem is that the main column has a max width of 65ch. I'd really like it if that column to filled as much of the parent as possible but not go above 65ch. Right now it will take as little horizontal space as it needs and nothing more, which looks weird when switching pages since the left alignment of the main content will be different. I want my layout to be responsive though so that no matter what I never get an horizontal scroll bar.

I also want the Edit this page on GitHub to remain right aligned relative to the main content which is why I used a grid layout as their parent.

Hopefully that made sense. I wish I could do a simple width: 100%; but that didn't work.

TLDR: I want pages with almost no main content to have a layout like the other pages with more content.

Edit: Looks like I managed to figure it out. I moved the edit link back with the main content. After that I used a flex layout instead of grid and I applied flex-grow: 1; to the main content and it seems to have done the trick.

I have a question that might elicit some good suggestions here. I am writing a scientific simulation, and in order to optimize it I would like to get a better understanding of how memory in C++ works and the best ways to optimize load orders.

Basically, I am working with relatively large amounts of data (arrays that are ~100 GB, on the lower end). I frequently have to shift this data around to different buffers in order to do some stuff to it, like doing Fourier transforms or computing other things related to this data and manipulating that output, as well as writing this data to files at various stages. Since the amount of data is so large, I want to get a better grasp of how it is being stored in memory, and how the operations I do on it might be optimized by limiting how often I am needlessly copying this data from one buffer to another.

Does anyone have resources on understanding how this works on a somewhat fundamental level? I realize that this is an incredibly broad topic and my question may be unclear or not even well posed - that's a reflection of the fact that I really don't know a lot about what I am asking. I am happy to clarify if there are unclear things here.