Show HN: TRUST – Coding Rust like it's 1989

kaant

Because Rust deserves a blue-screen IDE from the olden days and someone had to do this...

rob74

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...

vsgherzi

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.

awhenderson

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

WiSaGaN

Maybe I should start a project rewriting pctools 5.0 in rust!

eithed

Ah, Norton Commander takes me back

sourcegrift

Embed nvim in the right pane!

AbuAssar

nice (and clever) name!

pjmlp

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.

GuB-42

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.

0rbiter

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.

3836293648

This needs to have DOS builds available. Is it performant enough for 90s hardware? I know the rust compiler itself isn't really.

anta40

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.

joshka

Ha - I see it's Ratatui based. Nice work there :D

nazgulsenpai

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.

doubtfuluser

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…

forinti

If only it would fit on a floppy.

whalesalad

My first experience with programming was QBASIC in like 1997 - looked just like this. Minus the anti-aliased fonts, and a far lower resolution.

HackerThemAll

Turbo 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

I want an editor like this with proper vim support. Anyone know of any?