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fasterthanli.me
fasterthanli.me · Personal blog · on HN since 2020
Amos Wenger writes long, detailed articles on Rust, Go, and systems programming in an adventure-like style.
What HN saysCommenters praise the long, detailed posts and recommend 'A Half-Hour to Learn Rust' as a starting point and the Go critique for its quirks.
236HN people shared it
132linked it in comments
167stories submitted
10Kstory points
2 months agolast shared
2020people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1I want off Mr. Golang’s Wild Ride (2020)47 people · 570 points · first shared 2020 · 464 comments on HN
- 2A half-hour to learn Rust22 people · 1.5K points · first shared 2020 · 330 comments on HN
- 3Homepage13 people · first shared 2021
- 4So you want to live-reload Rust (2020)12 people · 50 points · first shared 2020 · 6 comments on HN
- 5I Want Off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride9 people · 717 points · first shared 2020 · 492 comments on HN
- 6A Rust match made in hell8 people · 126 points · first shared 2022 · 51 comments on HN
- 7Pin and suffering – async Rust tutorial8 people · 47 points · first shared 2021 · 1 comments on HN
- 8Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang7 people · 1.1K points · first shared 2022 · 525 comments on HN
- 9Why is my Rust build so slow?7 people · 298 points · first shared 2021 · 214 comments on HN
- 10Aiming for Correctness with Types7 people · 29 points · first shared 2020 · 5 comments on HN
- 11I am a Java, C#, C or C++ developer, time to do some Rust7 people · 9 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 12Abstracting away correctness (2020)6 people · 59 points · first shared 2020 · 10 comments on HN
- 13The HTTP crash course nobody asked for5 people · 907 points · first shared 2022 · 141 comments on HN
- 14Working with strings in Rust (2020)5 people · 38 points · first shared 2021 · 49 comments on HN
- 15Just paying Figma $15/month because nothing else fucking works5 people · 19 points · first shared 2023 · 12 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
pas · 2022-09-17
My usual way(s) of learning a new language is, depending on whether I like it or not, to start following related content (eg. the Rust subreddit, read articles that are too long https://fasterthanli.me/ and https://matklad.github.io/ , and watch hours of https://www.youtube.com/c/JonGjengset etc), then eventually attempt writing something in it.
And based on all this copying a megabyte might be perfectly A-OK. Computers are fast, life is short, keep structs simple because they can get problematic (https://matklad.github.io/2020/12/28/csdi.html).
dgellow · 2022-01-24
In the past few months I spent a lot of time consuming content from these two sources:
- https://fasterthanli.me, already quite popular on HN. Amos articles are often really long and have lot of details, they read like adventures and I love that.
- https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing, Old New Thing by Raymond Chen at Microsoft. He’s writing articles since ~20 years and has a lot of really cool anecdotes regarding low level Windows stuff.
I stopped trying to find platforms with long form content, personal blogs is the only thing that works for me (and HN, but that’s an addiction more than anything else :p).
ComputerGuru · 2025-12-15
Completely appalled to learn that docs.rs lets you inject any html/css/js you want into the live site (on pages documenting your crate). I love the flexibility but shudder at the security hole the size of, oh, I don’t know, the Grand Canyon.
It’s not a new discovery, I just didn’t know docs.rs (intentionally) wasn’t blocking this. Cf https://docs.rs/pwnies/0.0.13/pwnies/
(This all makes more sense if you read the blog post instead of the direct arborium link: https://fasterthanli.me/articles/my-gift-to-the-rust-docs-team)
vips7L · 2025-07-20
Here’s a great read on its quirks, and where it really isn’t “simple”: https://fasterthanli.me/articles/i-want-off-mr-golangs-wild-ride
https://dave.cheney.net/2014/03/19/channel-axioms
dcminter · 2025-07-04
Despite its age I still think that "A Half-Hour to Learn Rust" is an excellent starting point: https://fasterthanli.me/articles/a-half-hour-to-learn-rust
wk_end · 2024-06-03
The classic reference here is “I want off Mr. Golang’s Wild Ride”:
https://fasterthanli.me/articles/i-want-off-mr-golangs-wild-ride
ojosilva · 2024-04-21
I usually recommend the following for a quick-and-dirty learn-by-example Rust intro to programmers:
https://fasterthanli.me/articles/a-half-hour-to-learn-rust
drogus · 2023-12-29
I disagree that it's more pragmatic (and I love Rust), but in my opinion it's designed more thoughtfully. There are many articles pointing out various inconsistencies in Go, like: https://fasterthanli.me/articles/i-want-off-mr-golangs-wild-ride
Frankly I find things like that all the time, the most recent one I remember is my small frustration regarding rational numbers and duration manipulation: https://x.com/drogus/status/1728407593771471226?s=20
neonsunset · 2023-11-18
Good reading on the topic: https://fasterthanli.me/articles/i-want-off-mr-golangs-wild-ride#april…
naruhodo · 2023-09-10
The C/C++ interop in Zig gives it a great value proposition for embedded systems programming. My experience of that culture has been that C++ is "too unpredictable", so C is the language of choice. And glob help you if you want to use dynamic memory allocation. Zig could replace C and the preprocessor and support programming at a higher level of abstraction (generics).
I've tried a couple of times now to get my head around Rust with small efforts. Apparently I need big efforts and deep immersion. "A half-hour to learn Rust"[1] certainly helped with understanding the syntax around lifetimes. I keep reading that understanding the borrow-checker and lifetimes should be a snap for C/C++ programmers. Well, I've been doing C++ for over 30 years and C for longer, and Rust just strikes me as a bondage and discipline language.
[1] https://fasterthanli.me/articles/a-half-hour-to-learn-rust
cratermoon · 2023-07-28
Pros: popular and commonly used; good for data science
Cons: roughly the same paradigm and Javascript. weak/dynamic/duck typed, interpreted, garbage-collected.
I'd recommend learning a language that departs from one or more of those. Maybe learn a statically-typed language, or a functional language. If you're up for a bit of a challenge, learn Rust. It's strongly typed, compiled, and definitely NOT garbage collected. It's possible to get a running program very quickly, but the learning curve steepens after that.
If you do want to try Rust, here's some starting points
- https://chrismorgan.info/blog/rust-fizzbuzz/
- https://stevedonovan.github.io/rust-gentle-intro/readme.html
- https://www.lurklurk.org/effective-rust/intro.html
- https://fasterthanli.me/articles/a-half-hour-to-learn-rust
fasterthanlime · 2023-07-04
https://fasterthanli.me/
Infamous for discussions of Go.. (vs Rust..) but mostly it's me getting excited about learning & teaching computery stuff like:
ICMP in Making our own ping: https://fasterthanli.me/series/making-our-own-ping
ELF in Making our own executable packer: https://fasterthanli.me/series/making-our-own-executable-packer
HTTP 1&2: https://fasterthanli.me/articles/the-http-crash-course-nobody-asked-fo…
Anyway yeah! Some folks hate it some folks love it, we need stuff for everyone.
dogleash · 2023-05-31
Maybe it can't be solved behind closed doors because that's where the problems are? Rust's governance has always been a secret backroom and reliance on soft power to make the real decisions.
I don't know how well documented it is, but there are at least two posts acknowledging it https://without.boats/blog/if-you-can-keep-it/ https://fasterthanli.me/articles/rust-the-wrong-people-are-resigning
If this could be fixed quietly, I expect it would have been. But it looks like they had just finished using the back channels to make sure nobody gets the impression rust core thought ThePHD's research was worth perusing.
evrimoztamur · 2023-05-06
I checked his YouTube account to see the kind of content he was producing and honestly, not really impressed. None of these have educational value per se and look (at a thumbnail glance) like opinion vlogs.
For someone who's making a full-time living out of this sort of work, I suggest checking out https://fasterthanli.me/ who writes long-form technical articles on Rust, and provides similarly educational and enjoyable videos on his YouTube channel. He wrote about his journey and his decision to go full-time over at https://fasterthanli.me/articles/becoming-fasterthanlime-full-time
I believe firmly that the type of content OP is producing is not ones people find of monetary value. Educational content with a semi-niche focus is the hot stuff if you are interested in generating income. Provide service, obtain funds!
baby · 2023-01-21
Loved it as well. Reminded me of some of the blogposts over at https://fasterthanli.me/tags/rust
jonbc · 2022-11-17
The fasterthanli.me article: https://fasterthanli.me/articles/a-half-hour-to-learn-rust
I also love your channel, great work!
photochemsyn · 2022-10-21
What a great overall site. Hopping down the links I found the section on files with code examples in JS, Rust and C, plus strace, really the best short explanation I've ever found online.
https://fasterthanli.me/series/reading-files-the-hard-way/part-1
al_mandi · 2022-07-27
A good read about why golang does badly: https://fasterthanli.me/articles/i-want-off-mr-golangs-wild-ride
estebank · 2022-05-26
Try to debug where your compile times are going[1][2], but if you want a good rule of thumb: separate your crate into multiple if you can (that way incremental compilation will yield better results), switch to an alternative linker, like mold or lld, and use trait objects instead of generics (monomorphization can be expensive during compilation, while trait objects can be slower at runtime, but not enough to be worth it worrying about it).
[1]: https://fasterthanli.me/articles/why-is-my-rust-build-so-slow
[2]: https://matklad.github.io/2021/09/04/fast-rust-builds.html
sanjayts · 2022-02-07
This is a long shot but hoping someone might be able to help... Almost a decade back I stumbled across an excellent blog which had extremely long and detailed in-depth articles related to performance. Every article had a "hare/rabbit" mascot section similar to the "cool bear" section from this blog https://fasterthanli.me/articles/why-is-my-rust-build-so-slow
Does someone else remember that blog? If yes, please share the link!
Pr0ject217 · 2022-02-07
EDIT:
Paste this hacky snippet into your browser's console to save all of the links into your clipboard:
(() =>
{
let result = [...document.querySelectorAll('td a')]
.map((link) =>
link &&
!link.href.includes('ycombinator') &&
!link.href.includes('javascript:void')
? link.href
: ''
)
.filter(Boolean);
result = [...new Set(result)];
result.sort();
copy(result.join('\n\n'));
})();
Just to help, here's a compiled-list of all of the links shared here so…
tekichan · 2021-11-05
https://fasterthanli.me/
Really liked the overall theme and code snippets format
CraigJPerry · 2021-10-27
His hot reloading rust article is one of my favourites https://fasterthanli.me/articles/so-you-want-to-live-reload-rust
This chap is up there with Eli Benderski’s blog for me, i really enjoy fasterthanlime’s long form articles.
mwcampbell · 2021-08-31
> There is less magic, less hiding, which yields much, much greater clarity. No surprises, ‘it just works’.
I think the author of the following article would disagree: https://fasterthanli.me/articles/i-want-off-mr-golangs-wild-ride
avinassh · 2021-05-27
I love blog posts by Amos - https://fasterthanli.me They write long, informative, and fun articles. I usually spend hours to on each post.
Some recommendations if you want to get started:
1. What's in the box? - https://fasterthanli.me/articles/whats-in-the-box
2. Making our own ping - https://fasterthanli.me/series/making-our-own-ping
3. What's in a Rainbow table? - https://fasterthanli.me/articles/whats-in-a-rainbow-table
4. Working with strings in Rust - https://fasterthanli.me/articles/working-with-strings-in-rust
5. I am a Java, C#, C or C++ developer, time to do some Rust - https://fasterthanli.me/articles/i-am-a-java-csharp-c-or-cplusplus-dev… OR A half-hour to learn Rust - https://fasterthanli.me/articles/a-half-hour-to-learn-rust
bionhoward · 2021-05-05
Did you mean
https://fasterthanli.me/articles/aiming-for-correctness-with-types ?
I've been following the rust content, it's a readable and useful (to me) blog
jpgleeson · 2021-04-19
Good read. Amos used to be the most visible/active developer on itch and his twitter was interesting to read. He also has a lot of other pieces like this that really dig into how and why you go wrong when working with something that is unfamiliar to you.
I really enjoyed this one:
https://fasterthanli.me/articles/i-am-a-java-csharp-c-or-cplusplus-dev…
superhawk610 · 2021-03-04
This article [1] is a really great read on some of the pitfalls you encounter due to the way duplicate headers are parsed in different browsers (skip to "Let's talk about HTTP headers" if you want to jump right into the code).
[1]: https://fasterthanli.me/articles/aiming-for-correctness-with-types
bennyz · 2021-02-24
I learned Rust from the book as well, the only programming book I actually read cover to cover (though a lot of stuff went over my head, so I am occasionally revisiting).
I found some complementary resources like the following:
https://blog.burntsushi.net/rust-error-handling/
https://fasterthanli.me/ has a lot of very good Rust posts in varying levels
There are also some resources that are still incomplete, like the async book (https://rust-lang.github.io/async-book/)
and Rust patterns (https://rust-unofficial.github.io/patterns/)
And there are youtube channels like:
https://www.youtube.com/c/JonGjengset - He has videos about super advanced stuff (like implement a concurrent hash map), and the Crust of Rust which is more suitable for beginners
Another one I like a lot is Ryan Levick (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpeX4D-ArTrsqvhLapAHprQ)
jrimbault · 2021-01-21
This article (/quasi-essay) was a good read : https://fasterthanli.me/articles/aiming-for-correctness-with-types