Cut for time

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This series has to end somewhere, so let’s end it here!

However, here is a list of some things I’d like to come back to:

Using a bundler like Parcel so I can write some of the client-side logic in TypeScript, have it take care of building the SCSS, etc.

I do that to great effect in another project of mine and I’d like to show you how I did it!

More nix usage. I still want to do dynamic linking — a debug build of futile sits at >400MB right now. Stripping helps, a lot (so would compressing debug info), and release builds are smaller, especially with opt-level = "s", this is probably more on the C libraries I statically link against, than my Rust code itself.

While I was finishing up this series, I wanted to look at why my executable was so large, looked at bloaty, realized I didn’t feel like building it, noticed it was in nixpkgs, of course, and after a simple:

I could just… use it. It’ll go out with the next garbage collection round. Nix is pretty neat.

I’d like to actually show how to use one of those fancy Rust GraphQL crates. They do really neat stuff!

Re bundling: did you know Parcel has its own Rust-powered CSS parser, transformer, bundler and minifier?

I still want to integrate the asset pipeline (salvage) within futile proper. This might be doable without nix, but I consider it a prerequisite, due to the sheer amount of dependencies.

Improving search / login / feedback reporting / overall navigation of the site: I’m used to React and will probably reach for that (sorry, not going to wasm for that), but maybe it’d be interesting to explore some of the alternatives that “disappear at compile time” / don’t use a virtual DOM?

I’ve tried loosely keeping track of the frontend discourse, but it’s… a lot.

Gaining back some build performance: a hot build of my website, in development, takes 5 seconds on a pretty good machine. I’d like to try some sort of “micro-service architecture” but it’s just a bunch of binaries doing IPC between each other. Each target is built and linked independently, everyone’s happy. I’m curious to see how that would perform!

Also, once I’m truly happy with the current state of things, I want to get into slightly more ambitious stuff — I’ve always wanted to do interactive courses, interactive anything to be honest.

As a reminder, I’ve changed my goal on GitHub Sponsors to be: when there’s 500 of you supporting me, I’ll open source the code of futile, salvage, and other closed-source Rust codebases I own.

Of course that’ll create a maintenance burden, but we’ll think about that if and when the goal is met.

In the meantime, I’d like to thank all of you for your renewed support as I’m now doing this full-time — your support counts more now than ever.

Until next time, take excellent care of yourselves!