Eric Wang

About

Hello, and welcome to a place I occasionally write about things I do.

I’m a fourth year CS student at uWaterloo, with an interest in compilers and graphics, minoring in pure math with an algebraic focus and C&O with a graph theory focus. For a while I thought I’d minor in chemistry too, but you apparently can’t do that by only taking organic courses. Oh well, got pretty close.

My hobbies are mostly about doing things fast. I used to speedrun indie games and speedsolve various puzzles; here are some of my PBs:

• Speedcubing (3x3): 6.25 single, 8.72 ao5, 10.17 ao100 (officially, much worse; I should really go to more competitions)
• Nonograms/picross (15x15): 1:10.71
• Minesweeper (Hard, NG): 87.437

These days I take better care of my hands, so instead of all that stuff I study Japanese. ２０２２年１月ぐらいひらがなを習った後、別に活用していなかった。 でも、好きな漫画や小説を支援したり、直接に解したりするのはいいかなってずっと思っていたにより、 ２０２４年９月から本気で勉強するべく、『薬屋のひとりごと』の小説を読み始めた。

大分楽しかったが、超難しくて、たまにこの選択を後悔した。 初の本としてを冗談でも薦められない。どうしてもっとわかりやすい著作を選ばなかったのがわからない。藪蛇だった。 第3本を読み終わった時にあたり、『安達としまむら』という小説と色々な漫画へ逃げた。未だ逃亡中です。 その内に猫猫のことを再訪したいけど、休載する間に『葬送のフリーレン』を日本語で読み返そうと思う。

音楽なら、強い女性声に目がなくて、菅原圭さんやヨルシカが好き、Eveやtoeもよく聴く。

Projects

Some stuff I’ve worked/am working on. If its name links back here, you’ll need an access key to clone the source.

• joosc: A Java(?) compiler

  For my third co-op I did a research term at the PLG in Winter 2024. Woefully underqualified but eager enough to learn, nabbing both a URF and USRA was enough to convince Yizhou Zhang to supervise me. To gain background in compilers and PL work, I took CS444 (Compiler Construction) during the term and also audited CS442 (Principles of Programming Languages). joosc is the name of the Joos1W compiler I and two other group members built over four months as the main coursework of CS444.

  Joos1W is a subset of the Java Language Specification (2nd Edition) that notably (among other things) omits:

  • Nested classes
  • Exceptions
  • Private anything
  • do-while/switch/break/continue
  • Floats

  Essentially, it contains just enough to make parsing, name disambiguation, type linking and checking, dataflow analysis, inheritance, and virtual functions/interfaces difficult to implement. It also makes you hate Array.length, because final fields aren’t supported in general, but length acts like one.

  Both of my team members wanted to write joosc in Rust. Knowing zero Rust, I agreed immediately—precisely because I knew zero Rust. Four months later, it wound up as my favourite language. That’s right, this heading was really just an excuse to talk about Rust. All my homies love Rust 🦀.

  A little more on this here.

• Constructor: A UW-themed Settlers of Catan clone

  Also a three-person job, built in C++ for my CS246 final project in Spring 2022. Runs completely on the command line with a text-based board visualization. Catan, but with a lot more geese.

Contact

• e-mail: e224wang (AT) uwaterloo (DOT) ca