Amos Wenger, writer and video maker (aka @fasterthanlime), will be presenting “Rust + io_uring + ktls: How Fast Can We Make HTTP? ” at P99 CONF 24.
Note: P99 CONF is a technical conference on performance and low-latency engineering. It’s virtual, free, and highly interactive. This year’s agenda spans Rust, Zig, Go, C++, compute/infrastructure, Linux, Kubernetes, databases, and more.
We hope you’ll join us live October 23-24 to hear the talk and chat with Amos. In the meantime, let’s get to know a little about them!
Bonus: Also visit the fasterthanlime blog for hours of great reading.
How do you answer the dreaded “tell us about yourself” question?
It’s easier now that I make YouTube videos! I can tell people to just go check me out, and then they’re like “well I’m not sure I followed any of that but I liked the singing at the end”. Let’s just say I’m a rescue — wasn’t really employee-shaped, but the industry liked my deep dives in blog and video form, so I’ve gotten by on corporate and individual sponsors for the past couple years.
What’s the most interesting project that you’re working on right now – or hoping to start soon?
It’s a three-way tie between the software that powers my blog (an incredibly efficient build system with a built-in caching CDN), rubicon (which enables a form of dynamic in Rust, and should eventually be folded into rustc), and loona.
What will you be talking about at P99 CONF?
That third one! loona is an HTTP/1+2 implementation in Rust on top of io_uring and kTLS. There’s been regular improvements to io_uring itself in the past few years, and multiple attempts by Rust folks to harness its power, but I’ll argue that we need a clean break in terms of programming interfaces to really take io_uring for every bit of performance it has to offer.
What other P99 CONF talks are you most looking forward to – and why?
I honestly cannot wait for JeanHeyd Meneide’s talk about ztd.text — I naively assumed UTF-8 handling would be a completely solved problem by now, and I’m excited to discover exactly how wrong I am, and also if some of his findings when working on a C/C++ library can be applied to Rust.
What do you like most about P99 CONF?
I like that it’s free, it’s online, and you can register now so you don’t miss it— sorry this isn’t my promo video. But seriously, I’m working hard to make knowledge available for everyone and P99 CONF has that same spirit, which I really appreciate. Hearing battle stories from various parts of the industry, taking insights from bigger and smaller companies, is always a good time!
Any performance-related resource recommendations for the P99 CONF community?
Yes! Mara Bos’s Rust Atomics and Locks, published by O’Reilly and also available for free on Mara’s website.
