Rustacean Station Asciinema with Marcin Kulik
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Jan 31, 2024 Marcin Kulik, creator of asciinema and an independent consultant focused on Elixir and Rust, dives into his groundbreaking service that records terminal sessions. He shares the inspiration behind asciinema, detailing the challenges he faced while transitioning to Rust for performance improvements. The discussion touches on the development of a GIF generator and the importance of using the right languages for different project needs. Future plans for enhancing asciinema with features like real-time terminal streaming in educational settings are also explored.
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Three-Part Asciinema Architecture
- Asciinema is a suite: CLI recorder, JS web player, and an optional hosting server you can self-host.
- Recordings are tiny ASCII-cast files, making hosting and bandwidth extremely cheap.
Running The Public Server On A Shoestring
- Marcin runs the public server cheaply because recordings are tiny and Brightbox sponsors compute hosting.
- He says his S3 bill is extremely low, around a few dollars a month, thanks to caching and small file sizes.
Humble Beginnings Using script And jQuery
- Marcin prototyped the recorder by adapting the Unix script command and built a simple JS player using divs and spans.
- Early player used jQuery and supported only pause/resume, but demos worked across Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD.