Show HN: TRUST – Coding Rust like it's 1989
github.com102 points by wojtczyk 16 hours ago
102 points by wojtczyk 16 hours ago
Looking 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.
Some 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.
Heck, some of us haven't even given up on Perl.
I don't use it very often anymore (except for oneliners or simple one-offs) but I still like it!
>> 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"
Rust is not alone to compile slowly. And yes, there are reasons, but if you want to pick a language to fit the Turbo Pascal vibes, that's not it.
Zig and Go would probably be better modern languages for this. Also "Turbo Zig" and "Turbo Go" sound cool, "Trust" sounds too corporate :)
Not really, because contrary to Rust, Haskell, C++ and OCaml have faster alternatives, even though some people decide to ignore them to their own pain.
Haskell has GHCi, where you can pre-compile modules and play around in the repl with code that is more in flow.
OCaml has a bytecode interpreter, and a repl, thus you can compile only what you need, and do the full compilation for proper releases.
C++, well, yes it is slow, if you don't make use of binary libraries, external templates, incremental compilation and incremental linking, parallel builds, hot code reloading (VC++ and Live++), or REPLs (ROOT/cling, Clang-Repl).
Right, we can appreciate a lot of the heavy weight lifting by the compiler or blazing fast translations... in the latter case an assembler would do
It was intended to evoke emotions. I really consider this more of an art project than a developer tool.
I will see about the debugger.
Well 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/Antiqu...
> Fast! Compiles 34, 000 lines of code per minute
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
And if you feel using the language complexity excuse for 2026 hardware, see OCaml, Delphi, D, or C# AOT.
Thank 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…
I 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
The 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.
Cool! 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...
I can neither confirm nor deny what the T stands for. However a quick research showed some trademarks are current and renewed.
Random aside: Back in the day Microsoft used the "Quick" prefix and Borland used "Turbo". I am waiting for a QRUST.
VisualRust
haha - someone should do it
QRUST - I love that
Staying 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."
I 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. Thank you OP
The 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.
Thanks for the feedback, maybe I'll redo the screenshots
I 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/)
Thanks, I was looking into a terminal recorder last night, but then it was kind of late. I will look into VHS.
If only it would fit on a floppy.
This needs to have DOS builds available. Is it performant enough for 90s hardware? I know the rust compiler itself isn't really.
I think one of the earlier OCaml versions of the Rust compiler would be lean enough to be usable on a mid-90's PC.
Just 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.
My first experience with programming was QBASIC in like 1997 - looked just like this. Minus the anti-aliased fonts, and a far lower resolution.
To me it looks more like the early versions of Borland C++ for MS-DOS but yes similar TUIs.
Ha - I see it's Ratatui based. Nice work there :D
Ah, Norton Commander takes me back
Because Rust deserves a blue-screen IDE from the olden days and someone had to do this...
Maybe I should start a project rewriting pctools 5.0 in rust!
Honestly 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.
I'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
Thank you! I may build this out further. I just wanted to get started and feel like back then; share and see what happens. If I am the only one who is excited about this.
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
It's pretty awesome and inspires me more than lulz. Highly successful art project if you ask me
Thanks.
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.
OP 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.
A year or so ago I spent half a day writing some Rust on an actual DEC glass teletype (VT520) connected to a Debian box. I used vim and shell job control (^Z, jobs, fg, etc.) to switch between tooling and a persistent text editor. It made me feel things.
I can imagine. Thank you for sharing! I just saw one in the Computer History Museum.
Embed nvim in the right pane!
nice (and clever) name!
I actually expected an unsafe-only Rust because of the name and the "archaic" date (of course, "safe" languages did exist at the time, if not low-level and safe ones).
Still, cool project.
