Articles tagged #rust

My gift to the rustdoc team

About two weeks ago I entered a discussion with the docs.rs team about, basically, why we have to look at this:

My browser showing a docs.rs page for a crate that I published myself, which contains a lot of different code blocks with different languages but they're all white on black. It's sad.

When we could be looking at this:

My browser showing a docs.rs page for a crate that I published myself, which contains a lot of different code blocks with different languages. this time it's colored.

And of course, as always, there are reasons why things are the way they are. In an effort to understand those reasons, I opened a GitHub issue which resulted in a short but productive discussion.

I walked away discouraged, and then decided to, reasons be damned, attack this problem from three different angles.

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Does Dioxus spark joy?

Amos

Note: this article is adapted from a presentation I gave at a Rust Paris Meetup — that’s why it sounds a little different than usual. Enjoy!

Good evening! Tonight, I will attempt to answer the question: Does Dioxus spark joy? Or at the very least, whimsy.

What’s Dioxus, you ask? It is first and foremost a name that is quote: “legally not inspired by any Pokémon”.

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Engineering a Rust optimization quiz

There are several Rust quizzes online, including one that’s literally called the “Unfair Rust Quiz” at https://this.quiz.is.fckn.gay/, but when I was given the opportunity to record an episode of the Self-Directed Research podcast live on the main stage of EuroRust 2025, I thought I’d come up with something special.

Question Misc 6 of the unfair Rust quiz, about drop order.

The unfair rust quiz really deserves its name. It is best passed with a knowledgeable friend by your side.

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Making our own spectrogram

A couple months ago I made a loudness meter and went way too in-depth into how humans have measured loudness over time.

A screenshot of the fasterthanlime audio meter, with RMS, sample peak, true peak, and various loudness metrics.

Today we’re looking at a spectrogram visualization I made, which is a lot more entertaining!

We’re going to talk about how to extract frequencies from sound waves, but also how my spectrogram app is assembled from different Rust crates, how it handles audio and graphics threads, how it draws the spectrogram etc.

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crates.io phishing attempt

Earlier this week, an npm supply chain attack.

It’s turn for crates.io, the main public repository for Rust crates (packages).

The phishing e-mail looks like this:

A phishing e-mail: Important: Breach notification regarding crates.io  Hi, BurntSushi! We recently discovered that an unauthorized actor had compromised the crates.io infrastructure and accessed a limited amount of user information. The attacker's access was revoked, and we are currently reviewing our security posture. We are currently drafting a blog post to outline the timeline and the steps we took to mitigate this. In the meantime, we strongly suggest you to rotate your login info by signing in here to our internal SSO, which is a temporary fix to ensure that the attacker cannot modify any packages published by you.
Andrew Gallant on BlueSky

And it leads to a GitHub login page that looks like this:

A fake GitHub sign-in page.
Barre on GitHub

Several maintainers received it — the issue is being discussed on GitHub.

The crates.io team has acknowledged the attack and said they’d see if they can do something about it.

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Introducing facet: Reflection for Rust

I have long been at war against Rust compile times.

Part of the solution for me was to buy my way into Apple Silicon dreamland, where builds are, like… faster. I remember every time I SSH into an x86_64 server, even the nice 64-core ones.

And another part was, of course, to get dirty with Rust itself.

I wrote Why is my Rust build so slow?, which goes in-depth into rust build performance, down to rustc self-profiling even!

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The virtue of unsynn

Addressing the rumors

There have been rumors going around, in the Reddit thread for facet, my take on reflection in Rust, which happened a bit too early, but here we are, cat’s out of the bag, let’s talk about it!

Rumors that I, podcaster/youtuber fasterthanlime, want to kill serde, serialization / deserialization framework loved by many and which contributed greatly to Rust’s success, and I just wanted to address those rumors and say that…

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Open sourcing the home CMS

I’ve been bragging about my website software for years! For… whew, it’s been 5 years!

A screenshot of github commits for the beginning of my website. It has commit messages like 'learning rusqlite', 'walk stuff', 'import input files', 'parse frontmatter and stuff', and 'do stuff in parallel'.

I didn't want to make a CMS! I did it out of spite!

I’ve been teasing folks about the cool things I did from the beginning — here are all the articles and series I’ve written that mention it:

Go back to the homepage.