Hi. Yes. Sorry. I’ve been trying to write this post for ages, but I’ve also been working on a huge writing project, and apparently I have a very limited amount of writing mana at my disposal. I think this is supposed to be a Patreon reward from January. My bad. I hope it’s super great to make up for the wait!

I recently ported some math code from C++ to Rust in an attempt to do a cool thing with Doom. Here is my story.

It’s hard to get a feel for a new tool. Is it any good? Does it do anything I can’t already do? What’s the community like? Tough questions to answer without diving in and using it for a significant amount of time—and then you risk not liking the answers you get.

But fear not! I have discovered a new and brilliant way to discern the novel features of a tool, the vibrance of its community, and its range of users all at once. In mere minutes.

Look at its ten highest-voted questions on StackOverflow.

I’m totally serious. Watch.

Yelp had a hackathon a couple weeks ago. These affairs are mixed blessings for me: a fixed chunk of uninterrupted time to work on a single project is great, but I tend to have at least a dozen ideas that I want to do all at once, none of which can be reasonably “finished” in a scant 30 hours, and most of which are obscure enough that nobody can work on them with me.

For example, during this most recent event, I wrote a roguelike. In Rust.

Long-time readers may recall that I’ve attempted to write a roguelike before, in Python, but fell prey to architecture astronomy. This time would be different! Because I would only have 30 hours. Also because static typing limits my options, thus making it easier to overcome choice paralysis. (It’s a working theory.)

But first: a bunch of people have asked what I think of Rust, and now I’ve actually written something approaching a real program in it, so let’s start there.