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fasterthanli.me
Personal blog · fasterthanli.meprogrammingsystems
fasterthanli.me is a personal blog at fasterthanli.me about programming and systems. Since 2020, 242 different Hacker News readers have linked it 346 times, most often “I want off Mr. Golang’s Wild Ride (2020)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-12-31, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 14 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link fasterthanli.me for long, in-depth Rust and systems posts, especially "A half-hour to learn Rust" and the critique "I want off Mr. Golang's wild ride". Many commenters also cite its Go criticism, string-handling and strace/file-reading series.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Whatever is left of fasterthanlime, holed up in Lyon, France. Making dictation better at avette, building an AI workspace at kobl, and fixing build systems at vix. Writing · Videos · bearcove, my c...
Most-linked posts?
- I want off Mr. Golang’s Wild Ride (2020)41 people · 47 mentions · first linked 2020-06-27
- A half-hour to learn Rust22 people · 25 mentions · first linked 2020-09-05
- So you want to live-reload Rust (2020)12 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2020-09-26
- A Rust match made in hell10 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2022-02-12
- I Want Off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2020-02-28
- Pin and suffering – async Rust tutorial8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2021-03-28
- Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2022-04-29
- Aiming for Correctness with Types7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2020-12-12
- Why is my Rust build so slow?6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2021-12-30
- I am a Java, C#, C or C++ developer, time to do some Rust6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2020-08-13
What Hacker News says?
This may answer part of your question — it's focused on strings but draws parallels with C all along: https://fasterthanli.me/articles/working-with-strings-in-rus...
Comment linking /articles/working-with-strings-in-rust
on “A half-hour to learn Rust”Submitted A half-hour to learn Rust as a story · 1444 points
HN discussionRust is a systems (i.e. lower level) language similar to C and C++ that can be compiled to native standalone executables. If you're primarily doing app dev work, be it desktop or web, you wouldn't really benefit much from it. Although I think Rust code can be compiled to wasm so you could use it as part of webdev work. You might also find this an interesting read from the same author: https://fasterthanli.me/article…
Comment linking /articles/i-am-a-java-csharp-c-or-cplusplus-dev-time-to-do-some-rust
on “A half-hour to learn Rust”Submitted A half-hour to learn Rust as a story · 927 points
HN discussionThe closest I've written is this: https://fasterthanli.me/articles/getting-in-and-out-of-troub... but it explicitly seeks the complicated bits because elucidating those is the whole point of the article. I might write another one that focuses on the happy path.
Comment linking /articles/getting-in-and-out-of-trouble-with-rust-futures
on “A half-hour to learn Rust”Submitted The HTTP crash course nobody asked for as a story · 902 points
HN discussionI wrote a piece that tries to explain Rust's memory management strategy, compared to C: https://fasterthanli.me/articles/declarative-memory-manageme... Hope it helps!
Comment linking /articles/declarative-memory-management
on “A half-hour to learn Rust”Submitted Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang as a story · 748 points
HN discussionI have a lot of Rust articles[1] that go into a lot more depth. They're mostly adventures though, we learn about ICMP, ELF, file systems etc. Some love that style (the detours, the stream of consciousness) and some can't stand it. The Rust book is excellent, and a completely different style — they're complementary! [1]: https://fasterthanli.me/tags/rust
Comment linking /tags/rust
on “A half-hour to learn Rust”Submitted I Want Off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride as a story · 717 points
HN discussiondepends on use case, i don't think one language can fit all cases. 100% correctness is required for systems, but it is a hindrance in non-critical systems. or robust type systems require high compilation times which hurt iterating on the codebase. systems? rust - but it is still far from perfect, too much focus on saving few keystrokes here and there. general purpose corporate development? c# - despite current direc…
Comment linking /articles/i-want-off-mr-golangs-wild-ride
on “Shai-Hulud malware attack: Tinycolor and over 40 NPM packages compromised”Submitted Understanding Rust futures by going way too deep as a story · 475 points
HN discussionhttps://fasterthanli.me/articles/i-want-off-mr-golangs-wild-... this article made the rounds here after the author pulled the thread on dependencies in Go
Comment linking /articles/i-want-off-mr-golangs-wild-ride
on “Shai-Hulud Returns: Over 300 NPM Packages Infected”Submitted I won free load testing as a story · 461 points
HN discussionI.e. https://fasterthanli.me/blog/2020/i-want-off-mr-golangs-wild...
Comment linking /blog/2020/i-want-off-mr-golangs-wild-ride/
on “Things I wished more developers knew about databases”Submitted I want off Mr. Golang’s Wild Ride (2020) as a story · 428 points
HN discussionI want off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride [1] is a great read. The part about how different OS file permissions are handled in Go vs Rust is great. Even though I don't know Rust, I thought the Rust approach looked easiest since it's accurately represents the underlying systems. It was really surprising to see that Go's motivation in glossing over the complexity is to keep things simple. Is a half working implementation real…
Comment linking /blog/2020/i-want-off-mr-golangs-wild-ride/
on “A half-hour to learn Rust”Submitted What's in a Linux Executable? as a story · 359 points
HN discussionWhat a great overall site. Hopping down the links I found the section on files with code examples in JS, Rust and C, plus strace, really the best short explanation I've ever found online. https://fasterthanli.me/series/reading-files-the-hard-way/pa...
Comment linking /series/reading-files-the-hard-way/part-1
on “The HTTP crash course nobody asked for”Submitted Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang (2022) as a story · 342 points
HN discussionTry https://fasterthanli.me/articles/a-half-hour-to-learn-rust which is also written by the same author.
Comment linking /articles/a-half-hour-to-learn-rust
on “The HTTP crash course nobody asked for”Submitted Some mistakes Rust doesn't catch as a story · 337 points
HN discussionThis article [1] is a really great read on some of the pitfalls you encounter due to the way duplicate headers are parsed in different browsers (skip to "Let's talk about HTTP headers" if you want to jump right into the code). [1]: https://fasterthanli.me/articles/aiming-for-correctness-with...
Comment linking /articles/aiming-for-correctness-with-types
on “HTTPWTF”Submitted Why is my Rust build so slow? as a story · 298 points
HN discussionHi, I come across a lot of blogs when I curate for my newsletter Interesting Things [1]. Just looking through the links that have been curated in the past month or so, I would suggest: Tech - https://wasteofserver.com/ - https://tonsky.me/ - https://brianschrader.com/ - https://blog.thea.codes/ - https://fasterthanli.me/ - https://jvns.ca/ - https://blog.royalsloth.eu/ Non-tech - https://www.drorpoleg.com/ - About w…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted Small Strings in Rust: smolstr vs. smartstring (2020) as a story · 186 points
HN discussionI love blog posts by Amos - https://fasterthanli.me They write long, informative, and fun articles. I usually spend hours to on each post. Some recommendations if you want to get started: 1. What's in the box? - https://fasterthanli.me/articles/whats-in-the-box 2. Making our own ping - https://fasterthanli.me/series/making-our-own-ping 3. What's in a Rainbow table? - https://fasterthanli.me/articles/whats-in-a-rainb…
Comment linking /articles/a-half-hour-to-learn-rust
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted What's in the Box? as a story · 169 points
HN discussion> So, for those of you who are willing to explore the part of this that goes beyond a simple rational analysis and criticism of language design, whats bugging you? Error handling is a big one for me. This could be generalized to lack of expressivity; it takes an unreasonably large amount of code to accomplish anything. Generics will help with the general case, but they don't do anything for error handling. Lack of s…
Comment linking /articles/i-want-off-mr-golangs-wild-ride
on “Go 1.18”Submitted When rustc explodes as a story · 164 points
HN discussion
