Nick Babcock
nickb.dev · Personal blog · on HN since 2020
Nick Babcock writes about Rust, WebAssembly, performance tuning and API design, based on his own projects.
What HN saysCommenters cite it for WASM and SIMD in Rust, the musl allocator performance issue, and WASM versus native Node module performance data.
15HN people shared it
3linked it in comments
20stories submitted
708story points
1 year agolast shared
2020people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Default musl allocator considered harmful to performance4 people · 110 points · first shared 2025 · 90 comments on HN
- 2Authoring a SIMD enhanced WASM library with Rust3 people · 105 points · first shared 2021 · 8 comments on HN
- 3Results of Authoring a JavaScript Library with Rust and WASM2 people · 6 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 4The dark side of inlining and monomorphization2 people · 6 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 5Replacing Elasticsearch with Rust and SQLite (2017)1 people · 227 points · first shared 2021 · 48 comments on HN
- 6Reality Check for Cloudflare Wasm Workers and Rust1 people · 156 points · first shared 2021 · 59 comments on HN
- 7Designing a REST API: Unix Time vs. ISO-8601 (2013)1 people · 42 points · first shared 2022 · 50 comments on HN
- 8Recommendations when publishing a WASM library1 people · 40 points · first shared 2022 · 19 comments on HN
- 9Dropping an SQLite index for a 300x speedup (2019)1 people · 4 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 10The footgun with Docker Compose shared configurations1 people · 3 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 11Don't freak, but our Rust web server is now Node.js1 people · 3 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 12Simulating the EU4 map in the browser with WebGL1 people · 2 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 13The WebAssembly value proposition is write once, not performance1 people · 2 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 14The subjective nature of JS libraries exposing an off the main thread API1 people · 1 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 15WASM compression benchmarks and the cost of missing compression APIs1 people · 1 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
sitkack · 2025-01-24
I haven't used SIMD in Rust (or Wasm). Syscalls can be passed into the Wasm env.
https://doc.rust-lang.org/core/arch/wasm32/index.html#simd
https://nickb.dev/blog/authoring-a-simd-enhanced-wasm-library-with-rus…
Could definitely be more effort than it is worth just to speed up compilation.
Aissen · 2025-09-08
This is addressed in the article: https://nickb.dev/blog/default-musl-allocator-considered-harmful-to-pe…
elevader · 2022-01-21
AFAIK you don't really get native performance, although it's hard to find good data on this (https://nickb.dev/blog/wasm-and-native-node-module-performance-compari… was one I could find on the fly).
WASM is still virtual machine based and not compiled to a native executable so this is to be expected I guess, it's supposed to be faster than JS and it achieves that goal. Maybe it can be an alternative to Unity, which would be good enough for a lot of games, but I don't know how that compares.