Design & build · 2026
Rust Fractal Explorer.
A real-time Mandelbrot & Julia explorer — every pixel computed in Rust, compiled to WebAssembly.
Live demo
The problem
I wanted a piece that proves systems-level range, not just front-end — real compute, in a real systems language, shipped to the browser without hand-waving.
The approach
The renderer is a small Rust crate compiled to a raw wasm32 cdylib — no wasm-bindgen, just the C ABI and exported linear memory. JavaScript allocates an RGBA buffer inside the WASM heap, Rust fills it with a smooth-coloured escape-time fractal each frame, and the bytes are blitted straight to a 2D canvas. Pan, zoom-to-cursor, iteration depth and a Julia mode are all driven live; a single frame is a few milliseconds.
The outcome
A genuinely interactive demo embedded right in this site — the clearest possible evidence that I can write Rust, target WebAssembly, and wire the memory boundary by hand.