#rust lang

[msmissing-possum]

I think the reason I like rust is probanly because i don’t really ever use the unsafe keyword, I just found out they changed #[no_mangle] to #[unsafe(no_mangle)] and like….. Why????

[arbitrary-fascinations]

Why is there always so much weird drama in software development circles? I've been trying to learn more about low level programming. I already know C, but I am interested in all these newer programming languages, so I've learned some Zig and some Rust. But there's this weird animosity between fans of each language, or maybe more accurately between Rustaceans and the broader C/Zig/Odin/etc group.

To be clear, I think that for the most part the thought leaders on both sides are perfectly reasonable, and that they have differences in philosophy that are within reason. But the broader communities lose the nuance and turn things into "if you don't use Rust, you clearly just don't care about memory safety or security in general" and on the other side "only total noobs write vulnerable code with buffer overruns and use after frees, get good and learn how to use arenas and zero is initialization" or in short, "skill issue." On the real fringes, it seems like people are even associating each camp with general political affiliation, which is wild to me.

I just want to find a community of devs who are interested in learning as much as possible about how to write code that doesn't compromise on security or performance, without being weird and elitist about it.

I have played around with languages that are at the peak of conceptual purity and engage in several layers of abstraction, like Scheme or Smalltalk. I have spent countless hours having fun hacking things together in JavaScript and Python. I've just about learned what a monad is. But I know that "RAM/CPU isn't free" is not just an aphorism like "freedom isn't free," but a very relevant fact.

I feel like far from making performance conscious programming about ego driven "no one knows how to code these days, I alone am capable of data oriented programming and cache awareness" we should be thinking of it as a skill we should encourage everyone to learn. It differentiates you from the bottom of the barrel LLMs, and it lets us take back the power from companies that want to sell us new ridiculously overpowered hardware every year to run bloated web apps as desktop apps that have been vibe coded. Let's stop e-waste and write cool software that runs on a Raspberry Pi or a 20 year old Thinkpad. Or hell, go wild and code on an Amiga or something. No data centers required, maybe just a mesh network.

[agapi-kalyptei]

Solo gamedev week 33 retrospective (Mar 16~22)

too long to read just play it here

Monday: Made GUI a little smaller on Android. Added F keys (F1, F2, F5, F7) as shortcuts to switch minigames.

Wednesday: refactored a bunch so that ActivityStats code is a bit separate, so all minigames can use it to track usage. Added the stats tracking to game1. I added UI zoom settings to the UI config menu.

Last week the "fruit picking by moving mouse" minigame was left where it spawned a banana and increased score, but didn't save/load the score. I added that.

Thursday I was up until midnight trying to come up with an algorithm to spawn the fruit only in an ergonomically reachable area - not in corners, and with bias towards left or right hand.

Friday migraines started, but I managed to add the "handedness" config, and cleaned up the code a bit.

Saturday migraine, but added stats tracking to the fruit game and the garden game.

Sunday/today I added tweening, so the fruit pops up with an zoom in "animation", and disappears with a little spin and zoom out and a small "flick" away from the mouse cursor. Also changed the "handedness" setup to add left thumb and right thumb mode, so people on phones that can be held with one hand might have an easier time.

Released the version on itch.io, playable in web, on windows, on android.

Next up: having a real deep look into what I'm doing with my life and how to miraculously recover my strength.

[agapi-kalyptei]

To anti-complain a little. Rust is so so good.

Refactoring is such a huge part of developing software. (In short it just means "rewriting some small or big part to be better than before." It can be 10 lines of code to make it more readable, it can mean a few months of team work to reorganize code in hundreds of files to make it a lot more performant or secure or reliable. There isn't often a clear line between refactoring and rewriting from scratch.)

I used to be cautious about refactoring, not fully procrastinating or hating it, but it certainly was a risk. But with Rust, my love for refactoring is strong. Again, of course it's possible to make bugs in Rust, but if you need to refactor code that's not adding a lot of user features (i.e. an opportunity for bugs caused by undercooked design), it's just.. predictable? Steady?

Like you usually want refactoring to be monotonous and uneventful and boring. And Rust compiler makes it so much easier. No more forgotten places. No unhandled exceptions. No nulls that you forgot to account for. No enum cases that you forgot to handle. What was once an adrenaline sport is now just a routine.

[trains-in-space]

What Happened to Penelope Rose? on Steam

Explore an abandoned mansion, solve puzzles, find secrets, and discover what happened to Penelope Rose in this 2D mystery adventure.

What Happened to Penelope Rose? is a 2D mystery adventure game focused on exploration, environmental storytelling, and puzzle-solving.

Explore a long-abandoned mansion, searching room by room for clues, hidden objects, and forgotten details. Uncover fragments of the past and slowly piece together what happened to Penelope Rose.

Wishlist now on Steam!

[agapi-kalyptei]

ADHD Stimkit early alpha version

For now you can just click the button if you need to ward off anxiety or do stimming to help you concentrate on something.

Good grief it took a lot of metaphorical birth pains but I have a solid foundation to continue building a web/android/desktop application with ADHD tools and stimming minigames.

Sometimes friends ask me what it's like to be a developer. A bit of that under the cut.

So you want to learn Bevy because the ECS concept (doesn't matter what it is) sounds fascinating and aligns perfectly with how you want to write data-oriented applications. So you read the official documentation which is 2.5 pages and... that's it? Realize that the team is not prioritizing this kind of documentation. So you fumble for like a year or two and just watch tutorials here and there. Long covid and migraines and ADHD means you can't really concentrate.

Anyway fast forward to two weeks ago. You find a template for a project that should work on android. Cool! It works... somewhat. Buttons are flickering like crazy.

So you duckduckgo around, you find that it's a known bug that hasn't been solved in year and a half, so you try to rethink your design around not needing the traditional UI. So you try egui. That also flickers. So you try textured Mesh2d button. That also flickers. So you try just sprites. That also flickers but they didn't use to.

So you turn things on and off in combinations until you find that the rainbow background that you made months ago is causing the issue. When you remove it, bevy_ui, egui and fonts still flicker but buttons don't.

OK so you need text though. So you look up a bitmap atlas font crate, which is, a 3rd party library that allows you to write text that's composed on sprites of individual letters that are together on one "sheet" (atlas). But the crate is updated only to bevy 0.16 and you're using the latest, 0.18. So you open the migration guide and start looking at compilation errors and one by one you make it run on 0.18!

You don't bother with submitting a PR because you don't even know if the maintainer cares anymore, so you save a few hours there.

You copy paste some of the example code into your app and the text isn't showing. It's midnight on a Saturday so you go to sleep.

The next day you wake up and see an email that someone made a fix for the flickering! It's not merged yet, meaning you cannot update to officially released version and have it be fixed, but thanks to a mechanism in cargo you can just replace one small package with the fixed version from github. It works! It actually works. You've wasted 10-20 hours trying to work around it, and 1 hour testing this new fix, but it means you don't have to be afraid about deploying to android anymore.

So you discard the bevy_image_font and the bevy_ui and some other experimental code, and start learning egui. The syntax is simple, adding a button is one line of code, making it do something is another.

But the layout features are lacking, so you try to wrangle the positioning for a few hours and it acts weird but you don't care at this point. "Good enough" is better than spending another 10 hours digging into bugs and submitting github issues and you're starting to feel mild burnout.

You try to find a good, robust way to save game in Bevy. Turns out there is nothing built in. Turns out there isn't any build in mechanism for quitting the app, or rather, there is one that works on user action, but there isn't any hook that would work when user forcefully closes the application. So you first even need to design how and when to save data.

You find bevy_save but that is updated only to 0.16. You find 6 other options, get too tired to research all of them (you have 2000 open tabs already) and pick bevy_persistence. You find a crate that should detect path to application folders on all platforms, but it crashes on Android. You start debugging, digging through tens of thousands of spammy Android logs, you realize it doesn't give you any kind of "home" directory, so you hardcode a path yourself. That works.

You try a web build. Broken. Again the automatic detection of a home folder is broken, but luckily you can also just hardcode a path and the rest of it will automatically switch from files to using LocalStorage or SessionStorage in your browser, so that's a major win for your sanity.

But the wasm build is still broken. So you try to search for the error but that's giving you misleading results. You know that WebGPU doesn't yet work on Firefox, but you don't have WebGPU enabled, and WebGL should be used instead. You dig into it an after another hour you find out that some idiotic guide you followed three weeks ago which gave a lot of wrong information is biting you again because when you did "set(RenderPlugin { render_creation: RenderCreation::Automatic(WgpuSettings { backends: Some(Backends::PRIMARY)," it tried to force WebGPU even if you don't even have that bevy feature enabled. So you change it to

#[cfg(target_family = "wasm")] backends: Some(Backends::GL),

and that fixes it! Android works, Windows works, Firefox works.

Of course I skipped many other parts where the documentation didn't make sense to me, or stack overflow or github wiki or github issues advice was outdated, but I also didn't mention when discord members were helpful and pointed you in the right direction, or many well written articles and youtube tutorials that helped you make sense of things.

So yeah, that's a small glimpse into how it is to be a solo hobbyist developer.

[godot-official]

hey baby

https://godot-rust.github.io/

rust 💜 godot

Oh hi there! 🩷

Rust and Godot are a match made in heaven, it works soooo well.

Actually have a project going on with this setup...

...admittedly haven't worked on it in the past two months >.< Got distracted working on my automatic incremental backup tool written in Rust

Rust 🩷 Godot

[agapi-kalyptei]

good GRAVY, it took until 11pm but I got the x86_64-pc-windows-msvc build running in my CI/CD, so the maze.exe builds are now back at 750kB <- (virus-)free download for windows, and debian 13 (needs glibc2.39)

description here