A developer shares their journey creating progressively faster login shells, culminating in 'bare'—a fully functional shell written entirely in x86_64 assembly with no dependencies. The assembly version starts in just 8 microseconds, making it 27x faster than their previous Rust implementation and 3.4x faster than bash. This project demonstrates extreme optimization through direct syscalls and minimal runtime overhead.
Background
Developers often optimize shell startup time for productivity, with modern languages like Rust offering significant improvements over interpreted languages. Moving to assembly represents the extreme end of low-level optimization for system tools.
- Source
- Lobsters
- Published
- Apr 10, 2026 at 05:05 AM
- Score
- 7.0 / 10