Welcome to nickb.dev, a blog by Nick Babcock! Below are my most recent articles. You can find the history of all my writings in the archive or just find out more about me.
Authoring a SIMD enhanced Wasm library with Rust
Published on: 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 implementation on unsupported devices.
Replacing an unavailable ZFS drive
Published on: The day I’ve known for a while has come: a drive in my ZFS array has become degraded. How come I didn’t know about this for four months and what am I doing to improve monitoring? What steps did I take to identify and replace the drive?
A workaround for Rust's lack of structural subtyping
Published on: Compared to other languages, the lack of structural subtyping in Rust can be considered a hindrance. Here I show that it can be worked around so that one can end up with idiomatic solutions in Rust and in languages like Typescript that support structural subtyping.
Reality check for Cloudflare Wasm Workers and Rust
Published on: 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 excited and will continue watching this space
Simulating the EU4 map in the browser with WebGL
Published on: There are several ways one can replicate EU4’s map. The most popular methods have been to either create a bitmap image and suffer from scaling issues or derive a bitmap tracing routine to convert into vector graphics. However to create the most realstic and performant render, one should turn to the GPU. I talk about how we accomplished this in Rakaly.
Git Rebase to Squash Commits to Most Recent Message
Published on: You’ve been working on a development branch over a couple days, testing things out and exploring solutions. You aren’t comfortable losing work, so you create superficial commits. Your final commit on this branch is a beautifully worded message. But something is wrong. The commits with superficial messages are still present. So how do you squash several commits into one and take the most recent commit message? Solution within.
Wasm and Native Node Module Performance Comparison
Published on: Deploying code via Wasm is convenient as one can run the same code in the browser, nodejs, or via one of the several Wasm runtimes. What, if any, performance is sacrificed for this convenience? I demonstrate the tradeoffs in a real world example where I can take Rust code and benchmark the performance difference between running it as a node native module and Wasm compiled under varying configurations.
Stumbling with WebGL Image Processing
Published on: I’ve tried to learn WebGL to reimplement an image processing pipeline that I have setup on the CPU that involves indexed colors, edge detection, pixel-art upscaling, and more but the steep learning curve combined with other life changes has caused me to temporarily abandon the effort. I thought I’d document my thoughts so that I have a point of reference when explaining to others.