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A developer spent roughly a day porting 37signals' Rust-based Campfire chat app to Kotlin using Claude Code, aiming to see how the JVM would compare in DHH's running benchmark table of language rewrites. On x86 hardware, the Kotlin port matched Rust's requests-per-second and sometimes exceeded it, despite Kotlin not appearing in the original comparison table.
A developer has ported the original Quake engine to Rust, using memory-safe code rather than the game's original C codebase, and compiled it to run in a web browser. The port supports keyboard and mouse controls as well as gamepads, including original id Software joystick configurations, with adjustable mouse sensitivity to account for platform differences like macOS.
Bevy, the open-source Rust game engine, has released version 0.20 on crates.io, built with contributions from 227 developers across 817 pull requests. The update improves Solari, Bevy's realtime pathtracing renderer, adding speed and accuracy gains plus macOS support via Metal, alongside syntax changes to its BSN scene system and new widgets for the Bevy Feathers UI toolkit. A migration guide is available for developers updating existing apps from version 0.19.
A developer who learned Rust before C published a blog post listing surprising features of the C language, aimed at Rust programmers new to C. Topics include C's historically missing boolean type (added via stdbool.h in C99 and made a true primitive in C23) and its use of null-terminated strings instead of Rust's length-tracked string slices.
Spotifast, a new desktop application for Spotify, has been released as a native Windows client built in Rust, aiming to reduce memory consumption. It typically uses 150-200 MB of RAM, a notable decrease from the 600 MB to 1 GB used by the official app, while offering similar features and additional customization options. The app requires a Spotify Premium account and currently does not support lossless audio due to DRM limitations.
Google has launched Chrome 155, incorporating support for decoding JPEG XL images, a format that improves compression efficiency and supports advanced features like HDR and animation. The update aims to enhance web performance and visual quality, encouraging adoption among developers and content creators. Chrome's integration of JPEG XL marks a step toward a richer, faster, and safer web experience.
A solo developer has launched a collection of open-source creative tools built in Rust, aiming to replicate Adobe's popular products like Photoshop and Premiere. These tools, named PhotoCraft, LightCraft, and others, are available for download but have raised safety and functionality concerns among users. The developer emphasizes AI integration and a unified user experience across the suite, with claims of a clean-room reimplementation that does not use Adobe's source code.
Brandon Thomas has developed seven open-source applications that mimic Adobe's popular creative tools, including Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere, using AI-powered reverse engineering. The projects, built in Rust and announced on Reddit, aim to provide free alternatives without subscription fees, with claims of reaching near-complete functionality within a month. The initiative was partly motivated by frustrations with Adobe's cancellation fees and subscription model.
An experiment using large language models (LLMs) resulted in a Rust version of Microsoft's TypeScript compiler, checker, and language server. The process involved significant API token costs, totaling over $24,000, and produced a tool claimed to be 100% compatible with real-world projects. The project was initiated to evaluate LLM capabilities and to create a high-performance, WASM-compatible TypeScript checker.
Developer Brandon Thomas launched seven open source applications that replicate the interfaces and core features of Adobe’s Creative Suite, including Photoshop and Premiere. Using AI-powered reverse engineering, these tools aim to match Adobe’s functionality, with plans to achieve full feature parity within months. The projects are built in Rust and WebAssembly for browser compatibility, though they are still in early alpha stages.
A developer released ProcInSh, an open-source web-based process inspector for Linux that renders running processes as a navigable 3D space, accessible through a browser at a local address. It's distributed via crates.io or can be built from source, requiring Rust, a C compiler, BPF tooling, and kernel BTF support, and currently targets Linux x86-64 with limited WSL2 support.
Google says Chrome 155 will support decoding JPEG XL (.jxl) images, a format offering 30-50% better compression than JPEG, lossless compression, HDR support, and lossless JPEG transcoding. The decoder was rebuilt in Rust, via the jxl-rs project, to improve memory safety while matching the performance of existing C++ implementations.