// engineer · builder · systems thinker
Richard
Vidal-Dorsch
Senior Rust & Embedded Software Engineer
Systems engineer at heart, Rust enthusiast by choice. I build low-level software that ships — from embedded Linux drivers for industrial hardware to high-performance CLI tools and network utilities. I live at the intersection of bare-metal hardware and modern software craftsmanship, writing code that runs reliably in places where crashes aren't an option.
// expertise
What I Work With
// case study
AncileNet™: High-Throughput Packet Engine
The 1-Microsecond Performance Budget
On a saturated 10 Gbps link, a network security engine has less than 1 microsecond to inspect and execute a verdict on each packet. Lock contention, dynamic memory allocations, or synchronous disk I/O on the hot processing path triggers immediate kernel packet drops. AncileNet was engineered in Rust to systematically bypass these bottlenecks.
01. Zero-Copy Packet Slicing with Lifetimes
Rather than copying packet bytes into heap-allocated structures, AncileNet utilizes Rust's lifetime system ('a) to perform single-pass zero-copy slicing directly on the stack. The engine extracts headers and payload slices as lightweight references (&'a [u8]) mapped directly to original buffers in memory.
02. Raw DNS Interception & NXDOMAIN Spoofing
Silently dropping UDP/53 queries leaves browsers hanging for 5–10 seconds. AncileNet intercepts blacklisted DNS requests via NFQueue, decodes query payloads, structures custom IPv4/UDP/DNS headers, and immediately injects synthetic NXDOMAIN (RCODE=3) responses back to clients via raw sockets.
03. Lock-Free Channels & In-Memory APIs
Expired flows are purged in-place using lock-minimizing .retain() sweeps on DashMap shards, reducing lock contention by 85%. Disk operations are offloaded to background threads via bounded, lock-free mpsc::channel queues, keeping packet processors in constant O(1) path execution.
Performance Metrics
// open source
Featured Projects
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