fasterthanlime - Overview

Hi! I'm Amos Wenger, better known as fasterthanlime.

I run bearcove, doing open-source Rust and teaching through writing and video.

Current projects:

  • facet — reflection for Rust: one derive to replace serde, clap, and friends. Compiles fast (no syn), supports JSON/TOML/YAML/msgpack/args and more.
  • arborium — 98 tree-sitter grammars bundled for Rust, WASM, and browsers. Drop in a script tag and get syntax highlighting.
  • rc-zip — pure Rust, sans-io ZIP reading. Works with any I/O model. Handles zip64, trailing zips, the weird stuff.

Experimental:

  • vixen — hermetic build system with perfect caching. Content-addressed storage means cache hits across machines.
  • dodeca — query-based SSG where dev mode = production. Font subsetting, image optimization, minification—all incremental, all the time.
  • picante — async query system inspired by salsa. Tokio-native, with cache persistence and observability built in.
  • rapace — RPC over shm/tcp/websocket with streaming and codegen. Write the trait, get the client.

I spend most of my time writing in-depth articles, making videos, and co-hosting the self-directed research podcast.

Before I did this, I worked at companies including itch.io, netlify, and fly.io.

In a previous life, I worked on cool stuff like an MP3 decoder in the browser (that was before emscripten), the itch.io desktop app (it used to work!), I even made my own programming language, ooc way back when.