Technical notes, benchmarks, and build logs.

Rewriting wc in Rust

A Rust rewrite of GNU wc that uses AVX2 SIMD to count words at 7.5 GB/s -- 27x faster than GNU coreutils on the default mode, discovered through 12 systematic experiments where branchless scalar was a dead end and SIMD was the only path past 1 GB/s.

Single-file throughput (MB/s) on a 100MB generated text corpus across default, line-only, word-only, char-only, and byte-only modes. Multi-file throughput on 1,000 files (~53 MB total). Three-way comparison against GNU wc and cw (Freaky/cw).

Rewriting a Python web log parser in Go

I rewrote a Python web log parser as a Go HTTP service. On 1.89 million lines of real NASA access logs, the Go version parses 3.3x faster than the Python baseline. A parity harness verifies both implementations produce identical output before allowing performance claims.

Head-to-head on 1.89M lines of real NASA Kennedy Space Center access logs (July 1995). Go parses 3.3x faster than Python.

Rewriting xxHash in Rust

A clean-room Rust reimplementation of xxHash: bit-exact parity across all four variants, NEON/SSE2/AVX2 SIMD paths, and comparable CLI-level throughput to the C reference on Apple Silicon.

CLI-level throughput across four scenarios on Apple Silicon. The Rust implementation matches or exceeds the C reference on XXH64 at 16 MiB and trails by about 8% on XXH3_128 at 1 MiB.

Rewriting the Silver Searcher in Rust

A Rust rewrite of ag that replaces PCRE with the regex crate, reproduces the multiline print state machine, and cuts median runtime roughly 2x on the measured workload -- but rg and ugrep are still faster.

Historical first pass on the literal-simple workload. rust-ag roughly halved ag's median runtime, but ripgrep and ugrep still led.

Building Optimus in Public

Why I built an autonomous homelab SRE, how it works under the hood, and what I learned from real incidents.