A blog by developer Nick Babcock, who has been documenting his journey through web development, performance, Rust, Wasm, and homelab management for a decade.
Visit nickb.dev → RSS feedOn Hacker News May 2021 – Sep 2025
Software Engineering 3Web & Frontend 2Systems & Performance 2Databases & Data 1
Caveat: Elasticsearch is a multi-purpose, distributed, battle-tested, schema-free, log and document storage engine. We’ll be replacing it with a single-purpose, relational schema, me-tested, and custom nginx access log storage engine. Knowing that, let’s begin. Find this project on Github After building my home…
With native Rust support announced for Cloudflare Workers, one may be eager to jump in head first. I know I wanted to. However, I tested out a few use cases and found it too limiting. Either the desired APIs weren’t available, code size was too large, or the program couldn’t run within resource constraints. I remain…
In a real world benchmark, the default musl allocator caused a 7x slowdown compared to other allocators. I recommend all Rust projects immediately swap to a different allocator in a musl environment.
All the pieces have come together for widespread Wasm SIMD usage. The majority of browsers and Node 16 LTS support Wasm SIMD out of the box, and Rust recently learned how to compile Wasm intrinsics. Now I need to port a library from x86 SIMD to Wasm SIMD and distribute it in such a way that will fallback to a non-SIMD…