Raph Levien

I just got my M-VAVE FM-1. This thing is fun. It's especially gratifying because the base firmware includes my DX-7 emulating FM synthesis engine that I started about 14 years ago. I probably won't do firmware hacking myself, but I see the appeal.

A huge milestone: Fearless SIMD 1.0 is published: linebender.org/blog/fearles.... This was a real collaboration, thanks especially to Sergey Davidoff for pushing this over the line, Laurenz Stampfl, Andrew Jakubowicz, valadaptive, Benjamin Saunders, and Daniel McNab.

I just posted a blog post on my hyperbezier curve: linebender.org/blog/hyperbe... I've actually been working on this for years, and only recently figured out a solution to the parameter mapping problem. I think this curve is potentially better than cubic Béziers for 2D vector graphic design.

There's a lot here worth thinking about, and it puts in words some of the feelings I was having that motivated me to leave Google. I'm *also* quite worried about more direct autocratic control of US-based AI, there are signs of this starting to happen.

I spent the last month obsessed with finding colors that can't be displayed on a conventional screen. This is what I found. moultano.wordpress.com/2026/06/19/w...

Just like last year, we replaced a whole wall of movie posters with our own punny movie posters at the cinema where RustWeek 2026 took place. I designed seven new posters for this year's event. See the thread below 👇

I will be at RustWeek in Utrecht next week! Really looking forward to meeting people.

As a fun project, I implemented race-the-beam image decompression on RP2350 with DVI output. I can get 1280x720 at 60Hz with a bit of overclocking. PR at github.com/DusterTheFir... I'll probably write this up, the idea is pretty cool.

Our upcoming game The Hearth and Harbour is fully 2D, but with some neat tricks we’ve made it look 3D. Ethan, our environment artist, did this with a special type of texture called a Normal Map. (Thread! 1/7)

My "No Graphics API" blog post is live! Please repost :) www.sebastianaaltonen.com/blog/no-grap... I spend 1.5 years doing this. Full rewrite last summer and another partial rewrite last month. As Hemingway said: "First draft of everything is always shit".

As we go into the holiday season, there's lots of progress in Linebender from the previous month: linebender.org/blog/tmil-23/. Among other things, blur filters in Vello CPU (with GPU acceleration on the roadmap), SIMD progress, and a new port of Runebender to Xilem.

This is indeed an excellent talk, and I think contains the seeds of a path forward through the AI thicket. When tested against only "vibes," AI can generate reams of slop. But when tested against hard ground truth, in this case rigorous mathematical formalism, possibilities abound.

“We adopted #rustlang for its security and are seeing a 1000x reduction in memory safety vulnerability density ... with Rust changes having a 4x lower rollback rate and spending 25% less time in code review, the safer path is now also the faster one.” security.googleblog.com/2025/11/rust...

😎😎😎😎 GOOD THINGS CAN STILL HAPPEN 😎😎😎😎

My talk on "I want a good parallel language" is now up: www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-eV... Slides here: docs.google.com/presentation... Thanks Arthur Gleckler and BALISP for hosting the talk!

I'll be giving at talk tomorrow at the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, entitled "I want a good parallel language." Meetup link is here: www.meetup.com/balisp/event...

There was already a *lot* going on with Bluesky, and now it's under even more pressure. I wrote about how I think about moderation, affordances, expectations, human needs, and powerful trolls for @techpolicypress.bsky.social www.techpolicy.press/trump-admini...

Some updates from the Linebender ecosystem: we've published our monthly update blog (linebender.org/blog/tmil-21/), and also released fearless_simd 0.3.0 (github.com/linebender/f...). The train keeps rolling!

I gave a seminar entitled "How Rust won: The quest for performant, reliable software" at the Topos Institute on Jun 3, and the video (youtu.be/k_-6KI3m31M) is now published. I hope people enjoy it!

We have our usual monthly update for Linebender: linebender.org/blog/tmil-19/ A lot of good progress, especially on the renderer, and fearless_simd is coming along well. Also some personal news: I'm leaving Google and taking a new role at Canva, moving to Australia in January.

With Tom Lehrer's passing, I suppose this is a moment to share the story of the prank he played on the National Security Agency, and how it went undiscovered for nearly 60 years.

When I was little, the U.S. military came to our home at gunpoint and took me and my family away. We were imprisoned for years in barbed wire camps simply because we were Japanese American. I have spent my life telling that story, hoping it would never be repeated.

Cool to see this work happening, and look forward to some nice GPU compute acceleration for path rendering!

Topnotch reporting from Marisa Kabas on a very important topic. It's maddening that mainstream news sources are not meeting the moment. Support independent journalism by subscribing.

Last week I did a research retreat on stroke expansion yielding a cubic Bézier approximation. It went well. I wrote a summary: docs.google.com/document/d/1... That document requires a certain amount of context and background to understand fully, but hopefully some people will find it interesting.

Faster, easier 2D vector rendering by Raph Levien at RustWeek 2025! www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sv8... @raphlinus.bsky.social‬ #rustlang #RustWeek

My talk is in here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sv8... Enjoy!

I wrote linebender.org/blog/a-plan-... and published it over the weekend. I'm excited about pushing Rust SIMD to be more usable, and open to feedback about the specifics of the proposal.

Our data compression projects aim to offer best-in-class performance. @tweedegolf.bsky.social‬'s Folkert de Vries shows how SIMD helps us to speed up zlib-rs in compare256, a crucial part of the compression algorithm that finds repetitions in the input. trifectatech.org/blog/simd-in... #rustlang

This hits close to home. The PhET people are brilliant and dedicated, and we've shared ideas and some code on 2D rendering technology. One tiny facet of a great loss.

New blog post up on the state of SIMD in Rust: linebender.org/blog/towards... It's an update on my previous blog post from 7 years ago, and also links to a podcast I recently recorded with Andre Popovitch: www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0Wc.... I think it's a good intro to SIMD, and I had fun doing it.

I've now published my blog post, "I want a good parallel computer." raphlinus.github.io/gpu/2025/03/... . Thanks much to all the feedback on the draft, I'd like to think I've clarified some things that might have been confusing.

New blog post up on the Rust font loader now shipping in Chrome. I only had a small part in this personally but am proud of the team's work. developer.chrome.com/blog/memory-...

I'm working on a blog post "I want a good parallel computer", have a draft up (github.com/raphlinus/ra...), and am very open to criticism before I publish more widely. Feel free to respond here, comment on the PR, or contact me privately.

Really looking forward to seeing you in Utrecht if you can make it.

I have a talk in RustWeek on developments in Vello to make 2D vector path rendering easier to integrate into other applications. Hope to see you in Utrecht!

This is Enkhuizen beach when I visited there in 2013. It's the town in the Netherlands where I was born, something I've been thinking about lately. I have other beach photos of Maui (family was there recently) and Costa Rica, but today this is my choice.

I wrote about the thing I am looking for to make sense of the moment so that I can stop posting about it. (First post on my personal site in some time.) erinkissane.com/against-entr...

Many of us are aghast at the unprecedented dismantlement of the US administrative state. All around me, people are trying to connect what’s happening to historical events. Here's my attempt to offer a few possible frames for sense-making right now: www.zephoria.org/thoughts/arc...

Fellow NSA - National Security Agency veterans. Look at what’s happened at the National Cryptologic Museum. They covered up with brown paper the photos of Women in American Cryptology. All in response to President Trump’s anti-diversity executive order.

December was vacation time for many of us (myself included), but Linebender did impressive work on a number of fronts: releases of the Color and Peniko crates, progress on text layout and the masonry widget set, and a new Kompari crate for image comparison. Read more at linebender.org/blog/tmil-12/

I put a list of color resources onto the Linebender wiki: linebender.org/wiki/color-r.... I think it's a good set, but don't claim it's exhaustive, so if you've got more, please add them to the wiki.

crates.io/crates/color 0.1 is now published. There's support for all the predefined color spaces in CSS Color Level 4, some cool gradient math, and more. I'm excited where this will go.

I'm on a social media fast, which is why you haven't heard much from me, but I did want to share one cool thing. Our stuff has been 8-bit RGB for a while, but it's clear that's not going to cut it in an HDR world. Inspired by bevy_color, I've started a color crate: github.com/linebender/c...

A video of the GPU stroke expansion paper at HPG 2024 is up: youtu.be/qPmwbp7A3BQ?... I'm happy with the way it turned out, and there's some interesting Q&A at the end also.

I'll be presenting our paper on GPU-friendly stroke expansion with Arman Uguray at HPG 2024 today in Denver. We've put together a landing page with a 40 second "fast forward video," a link to the paper, and a fun interactive demo (written in Rust, based on xilem_web). linebender.org/gpu-stroke-e...