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Show HN: TRUST – Coding Rust like it's 1989
- kaant 5mo agoBecause Rust deserves a blue-screen IDE from the olden days and someone had to do this...
- wojtczyk 5mo agoThank you for noticing! :D
- rob74 5mo agoCool! I assume TRUST stands for "Turbo Rust"? If yes, maybe it would be worth mentioning that in the readme. I doubt that Embarcadero Technologies (the current owners of the Delphi and C++ Builder IDEs, and probably also the owners of other former Borland trademarks) would mind - but then again, it doesn't hurt to stay on the safe side...
- weinzierl 5mo agoRandom aside: Back in the day Microsoft used the "Quick" prefix and Borland used "Turbo". I am waiting for a QRUST.
- gpderetta 5mo agoVisualRust
- wojtczyk 5mo agohaha - someone should do it
- willglynn 5mo agoGlorious: https://seri.tools/blog/announcing-rust9x/ https://seri.tools/blog/announcing-rust9x/
- wojtczyk 5mo agoOne of the best Windows 95 projects
- mvx64 5mo agoWorks amazingly well: https://bsky.app/profile/mentalvertex.bsky.social/post/3lzvbqthees2n https://bsky.app/profile/mentalvertex.bsky.social/post/3lzvb...
- neonstatic 5mo ago> Y2k compliant! That's a load off my mind
- wojtczyk 5mo agoQRUST - I love that
- sourcegrift 5mo agoOf course a pole would love it! (Only mean it positively:-) )
- wojtczyk 5mo agoI didn't read it any other way than positively only
- monadgonad 5mo agoStaying on the safe side would be not confirming whether it stands for Turbo Rust or not. "You might very well think that; I couldn't possibly comment."
- wojtczyk 5mo agoI can neither confirm nor deny what the T stands for. However a quick research showed some trademarks are current and renewed.
- vsgherzi 5mo agoHonestly the experience looks pretty nice. Which is crazy to say for such an old style of program but I kind of like it. Perhaps just nostalgia for a time I never got your experience.
- 2ndorderthought 5mo agoI'm not mad at this at all. It probably runs with like 20kb if RAM. I realize the author is probably just having fun, but if a few modern features added to this and I would probably try it. Multi cursor, a little terminal window, some way to do code hints or intelligence. This would be a dream boat lol
- boxed 5mo agohttps://github.com/boxed/TurboKod https://github.com/boxed/TurboKod I started this just for the lulz, but now I've got: copy/paste/undo multiple cursors debuggers syntax highlighting (even nested languages with jetbrains style comments!) find-in-files integrated documentation integrated git client (roughly modeled after lazygit) spell checking and tons more that I can't even remember
- 2ndorderthought 5mo agoIt's pretty awesome and inspires me more than lulz. Highly successful art project if you ask me
- boxed 5mo agoThanks. I'm thinking it could be a sort of reference implementation to build your own custom IDE the way you like it. I'm going to attempt to get TurboKod to be good enough to be my daily driver, we'll see how it goes.
- wojtczyk 5mo agoOP here. Thanks for sharing! I love your project. Looks very polished and true to the experience. And yes, TRUST got started for the lulz and feels.
- awhenderson 5mo agoI haven't felt a lot of desire to code in Rust but I do now! Absolutely applaud this project - it's completely tugged on the retro nostalgia strings for my Turbo Pascal days. Also one of the reasons I enjoy the previously HN featured Microsoft Edit project immensely - https://github.com/microsoft/edit https://github.com/microsoft/edit. Thank you OP
- wojtczyk 5mo agoThank you! I appreciate your feedback
- WiSaGaN 5mo agoMaybe I should start a project rewriting pctools 5.0 in rust!
- wojtczyk 5mo agoI would love to see that.
- eithed 5mo agoAh, Norton Commander takes me back
- wojtczyk 5mo agoSame here. I need to fire up my PC AT again.
- sourcegrift 5mo agoEmbed nvim in the right pane!
- wojtczyk 5mo agoThank you for the feedback. I may actually add that option.
- AbuAssar 5mo agonice (and clever) name!
- pjmlp 5mo agoWell not quite, unfortunely Rust still has a bit to catch up with 1989, it isn't only the Turbo Vision inspired IDE. https://ia801901.us.archive.org/5/items/TurboPascal55/Antique%20Software%20Turbo%20Pascal%205.5.png https://ia801901.us.archive.org/5/items/TurboPascal55/Antiqu... > Fast! Compiles 34, 000 lines of code per minute https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_borlandtur5.5Brochure1989_772168/page/n1/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_borlandtur5.5Brochure1... Measured on a a IBM PS/2 Model 60, meaning an Intel 80286 running at 10 MHz with 640 KB for MS-DOS, up to 8 MB depending on extenders and HMA configurations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PS/2_Model_60 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PS/2_Model_60 And if you feel using the language complexity excuse for 2026 hardware, see OCaml, Delphi, D, or C# AOT.
- wojtczyk 5mo agoThank you for the references!
- GuB-42 5mo agoLooking at this makes me nostalgic in a way the author probably hasn't intended. Rust is notorious for its slow compile times, while Turbo Pascal was known to be blazingly fast. And the debugger, one of the most important part of the experience is "Not implemented". Dressing it as a 1989 IDE makes me painfully aware of what we have lost. Despite running on hardware that were orders of magnitudes slower than today, software used to be more responsive. By "more responsive" I mean that while modern systems are excellent at batch processing, latency is often not great, and because so much happens in parallel, also confusing.
- wojtczyk 5mo agoIt was intended to evoke emotions. I really consider this more of an art project than a developer tool. I will see about the debugger.
- pjmlp 5mo agoSome of us still haven't lost it thanks to Delphi, C++ Builder, .NET or even Java. However they aren't fashionable in the days of Electron and CLI nostalgia. So you end up with Go on vim, instead of FreePascal on Lazarus.
- anta40 5mo ago>> Rust is notorious for its slow compile times Don't forget Haskell. And what's other... C++, OCaml, etc? I guess a language with complex/complicated design is difficult to be compiled "blazing fast"
- 0rbiter 5mo agoThe window screenshots are clearly from macOS 26, the rounded corners look so broken. If Rust ran in DosBox, we would have the perfect 1989 emulator.
- wojtczyk 5mo agoThanks for the feedback, maybe I'll redo the screenshots
- joshka 5mo agoI recommend VHS generally for these (we use them for all the ratatui screenshots generally). I'm also playing around with doing a rust version of this (https://www.joshka.net/betamax/ https://www.joshka.net/betamax/)
- wojtczyk 5mo agoThanks, I was looking into a terminal recorder last night, but then it was kind of late. I will look into VHS.
- 3836293648 5mo agoThis needs to have DOS builds available. Is it performant enough for 90s hardware? I know the rust compiler itself isn't really.
- suprjami 5mo agoGo forth and combine with this: https://github.com/o8vm/rust_dos https://github.com/o8vm/rust_dos
- rho_soul_kg_m3 5mo agoI think one of the earlier OCaml versions of the Rust compiler would be lean enough to be usable on a mid-90's PC.
- anta40 5mo agoJust noticed in cannot build a standalone Rust source file "error: could not find 'Cargo.toml'" I assume first need to create a project by "cargo new" ...? Anyway, love the good ol' Turbo Pascal 7 Reference. Haven't touch it for more than 1 decade.
- wojtczyk 5mo agoThanks for letting me know. I shall add that.
- joshka 5mo agoHa - I see it's Ratatui based. Nice work there :D
- wojtczyk 5mo agoThank you! Ratatui was super helpful
- nazgulsenpai 5mo agoThe blue CRT glow of Turbo C++ / QBasic 4.5 IDE at 12 AM when I've snuck up in the middle of the night to poke around on the family computer on a school night when I was ~10 years old... I love this.
- doubtfuluser 5mo agoThank you for that - I’m definitely going to look into it. I realize that I lost the fun in coding. I’m in a different career stage now as well, but just seeing this reminded me of how I started a long time ago implementing snake, learning about graphics mode, double buffering / page flipping etc. Everything felt exciting and so close to really understanding what’s going on. And just seeing the blue text interface reminded me of how much fun that was…
- wojtczyk 5mo agoI am glad to hear how the project resonates with you and other people here. I was reading an article about coding in the 90s and thought, the best time I had was on our first computer. Starting out with Basic, Pascal, Assembly and C++. Text mode, VGA mode, INT 10h ... what fun
- forinti 5mo agoIf only it would fit on a floppy.
- wojtczyk 5mo agoWell, in release mode it is currently 1048KB. Works for a 3.2" HD
- whalesalad 5mo agoMy first experience with programming was QBASIC in like 1997 - looked just like this. Minus the anti-aliased fonts, and a far lower resolution.
- HackerThemAll 5mo agoTurbo Vision library, which apparently inspired TRust, had a great object model, in which you could derive built-in classes implementing controls, windows, validators etc., extend them by adding custom functionalities and seamlessly plug them into the system. Imagine extending the built-in TEditor class to handle syntax highlighting, or extending TDialog to handle complex multi-tab option dialogs. To beat 1989 and Turbo Pascal, TRust must do that (perhaps the Rust's way).
- segmondy 5mo agoI want an editor like this with proper vim support. Anyone know of any?
- noborutakahashi 5mo ago[dead]
- Nation3Labs 5mo ago[dead]
- applex1025 5mo ago[dead]
- handsometong 5mo ago[dead]
- vladsiu 5mo ago[dead]
- shreyas_p_238 5mo ago1989, this was the style of ide my school used to teach me C in 2015, so many frustrations, that turbo C was very very unpleseant to work with
- wojtczyk 5mo agoThanks for sharing. Though, in the 80s and 90s this was cutting edge and so much better than what we had before.
- rockscy 5mo ago[dead]
- RivoLink 5mo agoLove it, congrats.
- fithisux 5mo agoI like it. I will posdibly use it just for the nostalgia.
- wojtczyk 5mo agoThank you! That is what it was meant for :D
- kilakulusu 5mo ago[dead]