Whence ‘N’?

The process of how a 0x0A byte is inserted into a file named bar in a justfile using Rust and OCaml compilers is dissected. Just, written in Rust, relies on cook_string to evaluate escape sequences and ends up delegating to rustc, which eventually handles the n character escape as a 0x0A byte. The lineage of 0x0A bytes can be traced back through multiple versions of rustc, from when it was written in OCaml to its current version. The revelation of how this byte is passed down from compiler to compiler sheds light on the intricacies of character escapes in programming languages.

https://rodarmor.com/blog/whence-newline/

To top