71 items tagged “rust”
2019
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.
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.
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
2018
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.
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.
2017
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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”.