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.
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.
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.
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/)
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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).
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.
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.
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"
Zig and Go would probably be better modern languages for this. Also "Turbo Zig" and "Turbo Go" sound cool, "Trust" sounds too corporate :)
I will see about the debugger.
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.
"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.
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
https://getfresh.dev/
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
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.
And yes, TRUST got started for the lulz and feels.
Still, cool project.