liamolucko/particle-life

particle-life

A(nother) port of HackerPoet/Particle-Life to the web, optimised for performance using WebAssembly.

Particle Life is actually quite CPU intensive, meaning a JS implementation of it is bound to be slow. This uses WebAssembly to run as fast as possible, plus a few other optimisations since it's still not as fast as native code.

It's hosted at https://liamolucko.github.io/particle-life.

Extra Features

• The camera can wrap as well as particles
• Particles are rendered on both sides when wrapping
• Not locked to 30fps

Optimisations

• The step algorithm has been optimised slightly. The most expensive operation is to calculate the distance between two particles, but distance is the same in both directions - so instead of calculating it twice, iterate over pairs of particles and do the calculations for both.

Running Natively

Since this is written in Rust using generic libraries, it can also run faster natively. No builds are published right now, but you can build it from source:

• Install Rust
• cargo install --git=https://github.com/Liamolucko/particle-life.git
• particle-life