💥 The Slow Software Paradox, Reimagining SQLite, Dev’s Viral 2K-Star Plugin, & More
🐌 Why are your apps crawling while your machine is sprinting?
Welcome to HackerPulse Dispatch, your go-to source for the week’s most significant tech news and breakthroughs! From sluggish software performance to bootstrapping Rust, reimplementing SQLite in Rust, & more, these stories shed light on the latest innovations, disruptions, and the hurdles driving progress in the tech world.
Here’s what new:
🐢 Software Is Way Less Performant Today: Modern software is slower and bloated not because of hardware limitations, but due to cultural and educational neglect of performance optimization.
🤸🏽♂️ Introducing Limbo: A Complete Rewrite of Sqlite in Rust: Meet Turso's Limbo project reimagining SQLite with Rust for modern, memory-safe performance, featuring asynchronous I/O, WASM support, and 20% faster queries!
🧠 Memory-Safe PNG Decoders Now Vastly Outperform C PNG Libraries: Memory-safe PNG decoders in Rust, like image-rs PNG and zune-png, are now outperforming traditional libraries like libpng, offering up to 1.8x faster decoding speeds on both x86 and ARM systems.
🤯 Bro Been Developing His 2K Star Plugin on a Freaking Touch Phone: A developer’s 2K-star Neovim plugin highlights the power of consistency, community support, and creativity on a budget setup.
⚙️ Why Am I Writing a Rust Compiler in C?: Dozer is an ambitious Rust compiler written entirely in pure C, designed to bootstrap Rust from minimal dependencies and bridge gaps in the bootstrapping process.
Software Is Way Less Performant Today (🔗Read Paper)
Despite modern hardware being faster than ever, software performance has taken a nosedive, leaving us waiting longer for things that used to be instant.
In a recent discussion, examples like Microsoft Visual Studio highlight how slow and bloated applications have become, even for simple tasks. The problem isn’t hardware—it’s the culture and priorities in software development.
Lack of focus on efficiency and understanding of how computers work is leading to software that wastes computational power.
Video link:
Key Points
Visual studio, then vs. now: In 2004, Visual Studio loaded instantly and updated debuggers in real-time; today, even simple projects take 10+ seconds to open, with delays users can’t justify.
Bloat without benefit: Added features are often the excuse, but they rarely explain why fundamental tasks—like displaying an integer in a watch window—are so much slower today.
Cultural shift, not laziness: Developers aren’t inherently lazy; they’re shaped by a culture that values new frameworks over understanding hardware fundamentals, leading to inefficient code.
Introducing Limbo: A Complete Rewrite of SQLite in Rust (🔗Read Paper)
Two years ago, Turso forked SQLite to create libSQL, an open-contribution project that welcomed the community to innovate together. With 12k GitHub stars and features like vector search, libSQL has become a success.
Now, Turso is taking a bigger leap with Limbo—a complete rewrite of SQLite in Rust, designed for modern environments, memory safety, and full compatibility.
Limbo is open-source under the MIT license—interested devs can explore and contribute on GitHub.
Key Points
Built for reliability: Limbo incorporates Deterministic Simulation Testing (DST) and partnerships with Antithesis to simulate rare hardware and software failures, pushing reliability beyond SQLite’s standards.
Modern architecture: With fully asynchronous I/O and native WASM support, Limbo is designed to excel in modern use cases, from browser environments to high-performance cloud solutions.
Faster and simpler: Limbo already outperforms SQLite on some benchmarks (20% faster) and simplifies performance tuning by dropping legacy features, offering a better out-of-the-box experience.
Memory-Safe PNG Decoders Now Vastly Outperform C PNG Libraries (🔗Read Paper)
In the PNG image decoding, memory-safe implementations are now outperforming traditional, memory-unsafe libraries.
Rust-based PNG crates such as image-rs PNG, zune-png, and wuffs PNG have shown significant improvements in decoding performance compared to older libraries like libpng and stb_image.
This leap forward is attributed to optimizations in DEFLATE compression and image filtering strategies, with memory-safe decoders achieving up to 1.8x faster performance on x86 systems.
Key Points
Performance on x86 and ARM: Memory-safe PNG decoders surpass older libraries, with image-rs PNG leading the pack at 1.8x faster than libpng on x86, and wuffs PNG demonstrating great performance on both ARM and x86 benchmarks.
How it's done: Memory-safe decoders use innovative DEFLATE implementations and vectorized filtering techniques to optimize image decoding, making them faster and more versatile across different platforms without sacrificing compatibility.
Production-Ready: These memory-safe decoders are fully production-ready, supporting essential features like APNG and auxiliary chunks, and are already battle-tested on a massive range of real-world images.
Bro Been Developing His 2K Star Plugin on a Freaking Touch Phone (🔗Read Paper)
The Neovim community is celebrating a major success as a developer’s plugin, now boasting over 2,000 stars on GitHub, takes the spotlight.
What makes this achievement even more remarkable is the dedication and persistence behind the project, all accomplished with a modest budget setup.
By steadily improving the plugin and engaging with the community, the developer has built a tool that resonates with users and solves real-world problems.
Key Points
Consistency pays off: Through regular updates, continuous improvements, and thoughtful refinements, the developer has steadily grown a loyal user base. This persistence has enabled the plugin to gain momentum organically and attract widespread recognition.
Minimalist setup: Despite working on a modest, budget-friendly laptop, the developer’s focus on skill, innovation, and problem-solving demonstrates that high-quality tools are not always a prerequisite for exceptional work.
Community recognition: The rapid rise of the plugin’s popularity underscores the Neovim community's strong support for useful, creative, and well-maintained tools.
Why Am I Writing a Rust Compiler in C? (🔗Read Paper)
The open-source community has been introduced to Dozer, an ambitious project aimed at creating a Rust compiler written entirely in pure C—no C++, no flex/yacc, and not even a Makefile.
Developed as a personal challenge, the project addresses the complexities of bootstrapping Rust from minimal dependencies, ensuring the compiler can run on barebones systems.
With this effort, the developer explores the deep roots of software bootstrapping, starting from C and building toward a fully functional Rust toolchain.
Key Points
Why Dozer matters: Current Rust bootstrapping depends heavily on tools like C++-based mrustc, which arrives too late in the bootstrapping process. Dozer bridges this gap by offering a Rust compiler that can be bootstrapped directly from a minimal C environment, such as TinyCC.
The challenge of pure C: With no assumptions about pre-existing tools, Dozer is being developed using standard C and minimal system utilities. Leveraging QBE for code generation, the project aims to avoid external dependencies while incrementally supporting essential Rust features.
Progress so far: The developer has completed the lexer and much of the parser, with basic typechecking and code generation functional. Dozer can already compile simple Rust code, marking significant progress toward the goal of supporting libcore, cargo, and eventually rustc itself.
🎬 And that's a wrap! Keep an eye out for more updates, insights, and tech news.