Rust on Polaris64's blog

Syswall: a firewall for syscalls

Sat, 16 Feb 2019 22:07:00 +0000

Links GitHub repository Motivation A while back I started thinking about software and how it does what it does. Perhaps even more importantly, I started thinking about how we can know what software does, without relying on the software’s marketing pitch. Software analysis Software can be good and can also be bad; this is what we know as malware. For malware, a lot of time and effort is spent reverse-engineering the program’s machine code in order to figure out what it does and how it does it.

Rust WebAssembly and JavaScript: Floyd-Steinberg Dithering

Sat, 20 Jan 2018 13:16:00 +0100

Code examples Demo Rust WASM library and HTML (GitHub) Introduction Further to my recent post comparing the performance of a WebAssembly module written in Rust to plain JavaScript and WebGL shaders for rendering the Mandelbrot set, I have added an additional example comparing the performance of WebAssembly and plain JavaScript for the Floyd-Steinberg dithering algorithm. Check out the demo! Floyd-Steinberg dithering algorithm The Floyd-Steinberg dithering algorithm is used as a way to distribute quantization errors to neighbouring pixels in an image.

WebAssembly and Rust: performance analysis

Tue, 09 Jan 2018 21:05:00 +0100

Code examples Demo Rust library (GitHub) Introduction I have recently been learning The Rust programming language and I absolutely love it! Rust is a systems-level language (like C and C++) which provides compile-time guarantees about memory safety and safe concurrent behaviour. Readers of my Cybersecurity and technology blogs will know that I am interested in computer security, and we’re reminded on an almost monthly basis at the moment that computer security often leaves a lot to be desired, what with vulnerabilities and exploits of public data sadly being a frequent occurrence.

Rust/WebAssembly Graphics Library

Fri, 04 Sep 2020 20:26:00 +0200

Introduction

This is a quick post to describe a little Rust crate that I created for fun: a WebAssembly graphics library.

The library is not meant for any serious work; it has no hardware acceleration and is not highly optimised. I created it to help me to learn Rust, WebAssembly, general graphics routines and unit testing and benchmarking in Rust. I’m sharing it mainly for fun, but also with the hope that it might help someone who is learning this type of thing too.

Lishwist (beta)

Wed, 05 Jan 2022 21:50:00 +0100

I’ve just released a beta version of a new project that I’ve been working on: Lishwist! Lishwist is a web app which allows you to create and share wish-lists. There’s no registration requirement: just create a new wish-list (called a Wist) and bookmark the page! You can then share the list with others (one share per person) and these people can “claim” items to mark their intent to get the item for you.

Rust really is a superpower!

Tue, 02 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This is a small post in appreciation of Rust, the programming language, and its ecosystem. If you’ve read my other posts you’ll know that I have a strong interest in Rust. I have been using Rust for quite a number of years and I have released several posts about it, for example the performance of Rust when compiled to WASM. I’ve also built some software using Rust: Lishwist, Syswall and the Rust/WASM graphics library.

Verlet Physics Playground

Sun, 22 Sep 2024 12:51:00 +0200

I recently started playing around with the p5.js web editor and I created what I called the “Verlet Physics Playground”. That got me interested in other libraries in other languages that could be used for building real-time simulations like this. The rabbit hole I ended up in first took me to Common Lisp’s Sketch library. I love using Common Lisp and I’m especially enamoured with the interactive/REPL-driven development workflow. I had a lot of fun rebuilding the p5.