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---
.title = "Quine",
.author = "Martin Ashby",
.date = @date("2022-10-09T13:11:52+01:00"),
.layout = "single.shtml",
.custom = {"comments": true},
---

A [quine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_%28computing%29) is a program that takes no input, and it's output is it's own source code. A quine-relay is a program that outputs the source code for another program, and when that next program is run it outputs the source code of the first program. I recently saw [this quine relay](https://github.com/mame/quine-relay) program which was super impressive as it goes through 128 languages like this! 

Having recently learned some [Rust](https://www.rust-lang.org/), I thought I'd write a simple [quine in rust](https://code.mfashby.net/martin/rust-quine). It wasn't actually as difficult as I imagined, this took about 25 minutes. The rust standard library has a really convenient function `escape_default` which made it pretty easy!