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I'm sure fjall-rs isn't the first tech blog to implement a dynamic reading progress bar, but it's the first the caught my eye. Implementing it was trivially easy, though there are some browser pitfalls to be aware of.

I just added in the ability to render videos in my blog, and in so doing came across a question I hadn't considered before: how do I reserve space for a video that loads after the page does? Also, are videos loaded after page load, or what's the deal there?

Turns out: yes! You can reserve space for a video. In my case…

Zola is wonderful. It builds quickly, it's extremely configurable, but it is (by design) not well suited for interactive elements or complex JavaScript. I hadn't thought I wanted that until I saw some on Amos's site. He ended up using iframes to manage that integration, which is a perfectly acceptable solution. But it did make me wonder: can we accomplish the same result without all of that nasty ugly HTML? Can we just write some clean JS and call it a day?

Let's find out…

What if I just copied the Svelte compiler, written in TypeScript, changed all of the file extensions from .ts to .rs, and fixed all the bugs? It'd be a slog, sure, but at the end of the day I'd have a compiler that was very nearly the same, but presumably more performant.

This attempt I gave a real try, spending maybe three nights just chugging away. What I got was just more and more errors, which was fairly disheartening. I also realized just how different Rust is, and that a 1-to-1 rewrite would result in something that wouldn't be as ideal as it could be. For example, take this very simple TypeScript class…