Last December, I completed a half-year project to develop a continuous benchmarking system for the popular rustls library. My work was financed by ISRG, the makers of Let’s Encrypt, who are interested in rustls as a memory safe alternative to OpenSSL. The thing is, replacing OpenSSL is only realistic if you offer at least on-par performance. But how do you achieve that? What do you measure to ensure performance keeps improving and to avoid regressions?| Adolfo Ochagavía
Dependency resolution is something programmers usually take for granted. Be it cargo, npm, or whatever package manager you use, no one is actually surprised when this black-box figures out, all by itself, the specific set of packages that should be installed. To me, though, it is a fascinating feat. It feels magical when a machine solves an abstract problem like that, with minimal input from me as a user! I was, therefore, delighted when the nice folks at Prefix.| Adolfo Ochagavía