What This Is
A developer built "Gold Fountain," a browser-based 3D animation that spawns thousands of gold coins on click. It's a technical demo, not enterprise software. The interesting part: it demonstrates several optimization patterns relevant to teams building 3D web experiences with React Three Fiber.
The Performance Trade-offs
The implementation uses GPU instancing to render 50,000 coins in a single draw call rather than 50,000 separate operations. This is standard practice for repetitive 3D elements - instancing shares geometry while varying transformations.
Collision detection runs only for settled coins, not airborne ones. This selective approach trades physical accuracy for frame rate. The developer addressed "tunneling" (coins passing through each other between frames) by making collision volumes thicker - a common workaround when frame-precise detection is too expensive.
Typed arrays (Float32Array, Uint8Array) replace standard JavaScript arrays for physics calculations. These use contiguous memory blocks and avoid object overhead, making them cache-friendly for numerical operations.
Where WebAssembly Mattered
The developer added Rust via WebAssembly for physics calculations and reports 40% faster compute times despite marshalling overhead. Rust compiles ahead-of-time to native code and avoids garbage collection pauses that can cause frame drops in JavaScript.
The real lesson: WASM isn't free. Data transfer between JavaScript and Rust has overhead. Performance gains emerged only when calculation complexity justified the boundary crossing cost. For teams considering WASM, profile first - JIT-compiled JavaScript is fast enough for many workloads.
The Docker Detail
A GitHub Actions pipeline builds the WASM module in a Docker container and deploys to Netlify. The developer notes their antivirus was blocking the Rust compiler locally. Docker provided a reproducible build environment and isolated the toolchain from host-system conflicts.
This is standard containerization benefit - consistent environments across development and CI/CD. Nothing novel, but executed correctly.
What Enterprise Teams Should Note
React Three Fiber simplifies Three.js integration with React's component model. It's not a performance multiplier - you still need solid WebGL practices. Instancing, selective updates, and typed arrays matter regardless of framework.
The demo code is on GitHub and CodePen with detailed comments. If your team is evaluating 3D rendering libraries for data visualization or product configurators, the patterns here - particularly around instancing and WASM integration - translate directly to production work.
We'll see if the developer ships an actual product. For now, it's a well-documented technical exercise.