The Story of Rustroid (and also me, I guess)
If you don't already know, Rustroid is a Rust IDE for Android that runs locally on the device.
It All Began with Minecraft
Back in my past, I was a 12-year-old watching YouTubers play on Minecraft Java Edition servers with mods. The mods were awesome and mind-blowing, and I wanted to try them.
One mod that I wanted to try so much was the Morph mod. It is a mod that allows you to become any creature that you kill.
But I didn't have a PC or even Minecraft Java. All I had was a mobile phone with Minecraft Bedrock Edition, which didn't have any amazing mods. So, I decided to try to create a mod myself for the mobile edition. I didn't know what to do or where to start. I just downloaded a bunch of mods and tried to open their files to understand how they worked.
That was the moment I realized that the Android ecosystem lacked any kind of developer tools.
Back then, all the mods for Bedrock were just JSON files. I wanted a JSON editor, and all I could find was an application named QuickEdit. It wasn't very advanced, but it had useful features like syntax highlighting, undo/redo, and search/replace. However, it lacked a linter, autocompletion, diagnostics, or any of the features that make programmers happy.
In the end, I started copying and pasting some parts from here and there and created the most advanced Morph mod for Bedrock Edition at the time, using only my mobile phone.
And then i deleted the mod and moved on to other things, but that's not the point of this article. 😃
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