Simon Willison’s Weblog

Writing a minimal Lua implementation with a virtual machine from scratch in Rust. Phil Eaton implements a subset of Lua in a Rust in this detailed tutorial. # 15th January 2022, 6:29 pm

Announcing Parcel CSS: A new CSS parser, compiler, and minifier written in Rust! An interesting thing about tools like this being written in Rust is that since the Rust-to-WASM pipeline is well trodden at this point, the live demo that this announcement links to runs entirely in the browser. # 13th January 2022, 8:40 pm

Introducing stack graphs (via) GitHub launched “precise code navigation” for Python today—the first language to get support for this feature. Click on any Python symbol in GitHub’s code browsing views and a box will show you exactly where that symbol was defined—all based on static analysis by a custom parser written in Rust as opposed to executing any Python code directly. The underlying computer science uses a technique called stack graphs, based on scope graphs research from Eelco Visser’s research group at TU Delft. # 9th December 2021, 11:07 pm

Hurl (via) Hurl is “a command line tool that runs HTTP requests defined in a simple plain text format”—written in Rust on top of curl, it lets you run HTTP requests and then execute assertions against the response, defined using JSONPath or XPath for HTML. It can even assert that responses were returned within a specified duration. # 22nd November 2021, 3:32 am

A half-hour to learn Rust. I haven’t tried to write any Rust yet but I occasionally find myself wanting to read it, and I find some of the syntax really difficult to get my head around. This article helped a lot: it provides a quick but thorough introduction to most of Rust’s syntax, with clearly explained snippet examples for each one. # 5th November 2021, 5:21 am

aws-lambda-adapter. AWS Lambda added support for Docker containers last year, but with a very weird shape: you can run anything on Lambda that fits in a Docker container, but unlike Google Cloud Run your application doesn’t get to speak HTTP: it needs to run code that listens for proprietary AWS lambda events instead. The obvious way to fix this is to run some kind of custom proxy inside the container which turns AWS runtime events into HTTP calls to a regular web application. Serverlessish and re:Web are two open source projects that implemented this, and now AWS have their own implementation of that pattern, written in Rust. # 28th October 2021, 5:04 am

toyDB: references. toyDB is a “distributed SQL database in Rust, written as a learning project”, with its own implementations of SQL, raft, ACID transactions, B+trees and more. toyDB author Erik Grinaker has assembled a detailed set of references that he used to learn how to build a database—I’d love to see more projects do this, it’s really useful. # 19th July 2021, 12:18 am

Inserting One Billion Rows in SQLite Under a Minute (via) Avinash Sajjanshetty experiments with accelerating writes to a test table in SQLite, using various SQLite pragmas to accelerate inserts followed by a rewrite of Python code to Rust. Also of note: running the exact same code in PyPy saw a 3.5x speed-up! # 19th July 2021, 12:13 am

Internet Archive Software Library: Flash (via) A fantastic new initiative from the Internet Archive: they’re now archiving Flash (.swf) files and serving them for modern browsers using Ruffle, a Flash Player emulator written in Rust and compiled to WebAssembly. They are fully interactive and audio works too. Considering the enormous quantity of creative material released in Flash over the decades this helps fill a big hole in the Internet’s cultural memory. # 19th November 2020, 9:19 pm

Get Started—Materialize. Materialize is a really interesting new database—“a streaming SQL materialized view engine”. It builds materialized views on top of streaming data sources (such as Kafka)—you define the view using a SQL query, then it figures out how to keep that view up-to-date automatically as new data streams in. It speaks the PostgreSQL protocol so you can talk to it using the psql tool or any PostgreSQL client library. The “get started” guide is particularly impressive: it uses a curl stream of the Wikipedia recent changes API, parsed using a regular expression. And it’s written in Rust, so installing it is as easy as downloading and executing a single binary (though I used Homebrew). # 1st June 2020, 10:11 pm

Deno 1.0. Deno is a new take on server-side JavaScript from a team lead by Ryan Dahl, who originally created Node.js. It’s built using Rust and crammed with fascinating ideas—like the ability to import code directly from a URL. # 13th May 2020, 11:38 pm

Calling C functions from BigQuery with web assembly (via) Google BigQuery lets you define custom SQL functions in JavaScript, and it turns out they expose the WebAssembly.instantiate family of APIs. Which means you can write your UDD in C or Rust, compile it to WebAssembly and run it as part of your query! # 27th October 2019, 5:55 am

Terrarium by Fastly Labs. Fastly have been investing heavily in WebAssembly, which makes sense as it provides an excellent option for a sandboxed environment for executing server-side code at the edge of their CDN offering. Terrarium is their “playground for experimenting with edge-side WebAssembly”—it lets you write a program in Rust, C, TypeScript or Wat (WebAssembly text format), compile it to WebAssembly and deploy it to a URL with a single button-click. It’s just a demo for the moment so deployments only persist for 15 minutes, but it’s a fascinating sandbox to play around with. # 21st May 2019, 8:51 pm

Wasmer: a Python library for executing WebAssembly binaries. This is a really interesting new tool: “pip install wasmer” and now you can load code that has been compiled to WebAssembly and call those functions directly from Python. It’s built on top of the wasmer universal WebAssembly runtime, written over just the past year in Rust by a team lead by Syrus Akbary, the author of the Graphene GraphQL library for Python. # 16th April 2019, 6:04 pm

ripgrep is faster than {grep, ag, git grep, ucg, pt, sift} (via) Andrew Gallant’s post from September 2016 introducing ripgrep, the command-line grep tool he wrote using Rust (on top of the Rust regular expression library also written by Andrew). ripgrep is a beautifully designed CLI interface and is crazy fast, and this post describes how it gets its performance in a huge amount of detail, right down to comparing the different algorithmic approaches used by other similar tools. I recently learned that ripgrep ships as part of VS Code, which is why VS Code’s search-across-project feature is so fast. In fact, if you dig around in the OS X package you can find the rg binary already installed on your mac: find /Applications/Visual* | grep bin/rg # 16th April 2019, 5:52 pm

Build impossible programs. Delightful talk by Julia Evans describing how she went about building a Ruby profiler in Rust despite having no knowledge of Ruby internals and only beginner’s knowledge of Rust. # 19th September 2018, 6:38 pm

Touring a Fast, Safe, and Complete(ish) Web Service in Rust. Brandur’s notes from building a high performance web service in Rust, using PostgreSQL via the Diesel ORM and the Rust actix-web framework which provides Erlang-style actors and promise-based async concurrency. # 28th March 2018, 3:47 pm

Boiling the Ocean, Incrementally—How Stylo Brought Rust and Servo to Firefox. Firefox Quantum is the product of an impressive, highly risky chain of software engineering—Rust, Servo, then Stylo. # 28th November 2017, 8:34 pm

Entering the Quantum Era—How Firefox got fast again and where it’s going to get faster. I’ve been trying out the beta of Firefox 57 and it’s fantastic. All of that work on Servo and Rust is definitely paying off! # 13th November 2017, 4:34 pm

How Sentry Receives 20 Billion Events Per Month While Preparing To Handle Twice That. RabbitMQ federation, nginx and HAProxy, Riak as a key/value store, data processing is still mainly Python with a little bit of Rust. As of July 2017 it’s all hosted on Google Cloud Platform. # 8th November 2017, 11:32 pm

Fun facts about Rust’s growing popularity. TIL Rust is used “on hundreds of millions of desktops via Dropbox”. And Rust developers are called Rustaceans. # 30th October 2017, 4:45 am

The Xi Text Engine CRDT (via) Xi is “a modern editor with a backend written in Rust”—an open-source text editor project from Google built on some very interesting computer science (Conflict-free Replicated Data Types). It’s a native editor with server-backed synchronization as a first-class concept. # 13th October 2017, 10:32 pm

fd (via) “A simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to find.” Written in rust, with a less confusing default command-line syntax than the regular find command. Microbenchmark shows it running 7x faster. Install it on OS X using “brew install fd”. # 8th October 2017, 9:27 pm