Top all-time · #5146
Nick Babcock
Personal blog · nickb.dev/blog · on HN as comagoosieprogrammingweb
Nick Babcock's personal blog at nickb.dev covers programming and web. Since 2020, 15 different Hacker News readers have linked it 23 times, most often “Default musl allocator considered harmful to performance”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-07-18, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link this blog as a source on WebAssembly performance, SIMD in Rust and Wasm, and the musl default allocator's performance. The comments cite posts without judging them.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
A blog by developer Nick Babcock, who has been documenting his journey through web development, performance, Rust, Wasm, and homelab management for a decade.
Most-linked posts?
- Default musl allocator considered harmful to performance3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-02-06
- Authoring a SIMD enhanced WASM library with Rust2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-12-14
- The dark side of inlining and monomorphization2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-12-22
- Results of Authoring a JavaScript Library with Rust and WASM2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-10-09
What Hacker News says?
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-librar... Could definitely be more effort than it is worth just to speed up compilation.
Comment linking /blog/authoring-a-simd-enhanced-wasm-library-with-rust/
on “Wild – A fast linker for Linux”Submitted Replacing Elasticsearch with Rust and SQLite (2017) as a story · 227 points
HN discussionAFAIK 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-performan... 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 b…
Comment linking /blog/wasm-and-native-node-module-performance-comparison
on “WebAssembly: The New Kubernetes?”Submitted Reality Check for Cloudflare Wasm Workers and Rust as a story · 156 points
HN discussionThis is addressed in the article: https://nickb.dev/blog/default-musl-allocator-considered-har...
Comment linking /blog/default-musl-allocator-considered-harmful-to-performance/
on “Default musl allocator considered harmful to performance”Submitted Default musl allocator considered harmful to performance as a story · 104 points
HN discussionSubmitted Authoring a SIMD enhanced WASM library with Rust as a story · 103 points
HN discussionSubmitted Designing a REST API: Unix Time vs. ISO-8601 (2013) as a story · 42 points
HN discussionSubmitted Recommendations when publishing a WASM library as a story · 40 points
HN discussionSubmitted Dropping an SQLite index for a 300x speedup (2019) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted The dark side of inlining and monomorphization as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Default musl allocator considered harmful (to performance) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Default musl allocator considered harmful (to performance) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Don't freak, but our Rust web server is now Node.js as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted The footgun with Docker Compose shared configurations as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Results of Authoring a JavaScript Library with Rust and WASM as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Results of Authoring a JavaScript Library with Rust and WASM as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted The dark side of inlining and monomorphization as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The WebAssembly value proposition is write once, not performance as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Authoring a SIMD enhanced WASM library with Rust as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Simulating the EU4 map in the browser with WebGL as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted WASM compression benchmarks and the cost of missing compression APIs as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The subjective nature of JS libraries exposing an off the main thread API as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
