MrTimmyJ

Project Details

        A performant, multithreaded implementation of Conway’s Game of Life using Rust and WebAssembly. This interactive cellular automaton runs directly in the browser, leveraging Rust’s memory safety and WebAssembly's execution speed to deliver a responsive simulation rendered in HTML/JavaScript.

        This project simulates Conway's Game of Life with a focus on performance, modularity, and WebAssembly integration. Written in Rust and compiled to WebAssembly, it offers a fast and memory-safe runtime with multithreaded simulation logic. Useful as an educational tool, playground for WebAssembly + Rust experiments, or foundation for more complex simulations.

🧱 Grid Model

• The universe is stored as a 1D Vec with calculated 2D indexing
• Cells are either Alive or Dead (enum)
• Grid dimensions are defined by width and height

🚦 State Transitions

• On each tick, the simulation calculates the number of living neighbors
• Rules follow Conway’s original logic:
• Any live cell with 2–3 live neighbors survives
• Dead cells with exactly 3 live neighbors become alive

🧵 Multithreaded Updates

• The universe is divided into horizontal slices
• Each slice is processed in a separate thread using std::thread
• Slices are merged at the end to form the next universe state

⏱️ Performance Logging

• A Timer struct wraps execution steps
• Execution time is logged via web_sys::console::time() and .time_end()

Project Features

• 🕸️ WebAssembly Integration: Compiles to .wasm for browser execution
• ♻️ Multithreaded Update Logic: Uses native Rust threads to parallelize universe state updates
• ◼️ ASCII Output for Debugging: Simple visual feedback of simulation state
• 🧮 Cell Toggle Logic: Click to activate/deactivate individual cells (JS-side integration)
• ⏱️ Performance Profiling: Custom Timer struct logs execution times to the browser console
• 💻 Cross-Platform: Runs on any browser with WebAssembly support

Project User Workflow

• Launch the web application
• Watch Conway’s Game of Life evolve with real-time updates
• Click cells to toggle state
• Pause game state to stop game
• Modify update rules or grid size via Rust and recompile