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New series · Demoscene 2026

A whole world in 11,748 bytes.

A deep dive into the demoscene: its history, its rules, and an intro of my own. star_fabric 64K flies through a volumetric nebula for 150 seconds, with its own soundtrack, and uses less than a fifth of the 64k limit.

Start the series How it fit into 64k

A frame from star_fabric 64K: teal and magenta gas swirls into a tunnel.

star_fabric 64K · Rust + Metal · Apple Silicon

Build Bytes Of 64k
std + objc2 338,560 517%
no_std build 67,888 104%
lzma dropper 11,748 18%
Inside the file150 s · 5 scenes · 0 textures · 0 samples · 0 crates

All seven parts

Reading series

Latest writing

338 KB → 11.7 KB: Rust without std, Objective-C without bindings, and a shell dropper

Demoscene
Rust
macOS

Shrinking star_fabric 64K step by step: what actually takes up space in the binary, no_std and no_main, raw objc_msgSend and a delegate class built at runtime, shader minification, and a self-extracting dropper on the system’s lzma. The result: 11,748 bytes.
Nov 6, 2026
12 min

Locking the picture to the music: audio clock, sidechain, and beat

Demoscene
Audio
macOS

AudioQueue through plain FFI, time taken from the audio device instead of a timer, smooth clock correction without jumps, and one kick-drum envelope that pumps both the sound and the camera.
Nov 5, 2026
10 min

A synthesizer in 600 lines: a soundtrack without a single sample

Demoscene
Audio
Rust

How to write a kick, bass, pad, FM bells, a delay, and a reverb in no_std Rust, make the shape of the track follow the demo’s timeline, and check the sound without listening to it: RMS, peaks, and a spectrogram.
Nov 4, 2026
16 min

Noise in one fetch: a 3D texture instead of eight hashes

Demoscene
Computer graphics
Performance

A classic demoscene trick: random numbers are generated at startup into a 64³ 3D texture, and the GPU does the interpolation. Zero bytes on disk, 512 KiB of video memory, and 7.48 → 3.21 ms per frame.
Nov 3, 2026
8 min

Six iterations to a picture: debugging a shader without a screen

Demoscene
Computer graphics
Debugging

The first version of the nebula was overexposed cotton wool filling the whole screen. How an offscreen renderer that writes PNGs and a sheet of 12 frames turned “looks better, I think” into a measurable process, and why you should look at pixels 1:1.
Nov 2, 2026
9 min

A nebula from nothing: volumetric ray marching in one fragment shader

Demoscene
Computer graphics
Metal

We connect Metal to a macOS window and grow a volumetric nebula step by step: a fullscreen triangle, a camera ray, fbm noise, marching through a volume, a star, and scenes. Every step shows a real frame.
Nov 1, 2026
23 min

The demoscene in 2026: why write a 64k intro in Rust on macOS

Demoscene
Rust
macOS

What the demoscene is, why the genre of whole worlds built from formulas in 64 kilobytes is still alive, and the first step of the star_fabric 64K project: a macOS window and a timeline that is a function of time.
Oct 31, 2026
17 min

At 128 tokens, loss slowed llama.cpp RPC down a slope, not off a cliff

Experiments
Distributed systems

With generation fixed at 128 tokens, median speed fell from 44.9 to 22.9 tok/s between 0% and 5% one-way loss. Twelve of 30 requests at 5% ran below half their block baseline, and every request still exited 0.
Oct 7, 2026
5 min

At 5% packet loss, 16 of 30 llama.cpp RPC requests fell below half their baseline

Experiments
Distributed systems

Across 30 repeated requests, 5% one-way loss made 16 run below half their local baseline. Every request still exited successfully, and the logs named no degraded path.
Oct 6, 2026
7 min

A slow RPC worker finishes quietly. A dead one aborts the client.

Experiments
Distributed systems

Delay on a live llama.cpp worker leaves exit code 0 and empty logs. Stopping that worker mid-generation yields exit code 134 and an explicit crash line. The worker logs name neither case.
Sep 24, 2026
6 min

A 50 ms egress delay slows llama.cpp RPC, and the logs do not say so

Experiments
Distributed systems

One-way delay on a single RPC worker cuts generation rate from about 22–33 tok/s to about 11 tok/s. Neither the client nor the workers report a bad path.
Sep 23, 2026
6 min
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