KLklaussilveira·Apr 27, 2023Submission
RustDoom: Doom Renderer Written in Rust
2 points · Open discussioncristicbz
rust-doom
Rust2014–2023
cristicbz / rust-doom
rust-doom
A Doom Renderer written in Rust.
7Distinct people
9Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
2.4KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
A Doom Renderer written in Rust.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year9 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2014-10-12 00:41:54 UTC to 2023-04-27 12:40:50 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 1 | 3 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 2 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
9 sources> How long have you worked on only this project?
It's hard to quantify how much time _this_ project took, since when I started a year ago I knew nothing about Doom or Rust. If I started writing it now from scratch, I could probably hammer it out in a working week. A better programmer could probably do it in a weekend. It's neither very big nor very hard.
But that's not how programming works, is it? In fairness, you'd need to count some of the time I spent working on a lot of other random Rust side projects and reading blog posts over the last year, while only spending a couple of hours ever other week or so on rust-doom.
> Certainly wrestled with the ownership system for a while
I think my background in modern C++ helped me a lot with this, since the "one owner per thing, move semantics" model is how you're supposed to write C++ too.
That
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said, figuring out the cleanest design is not easy and I'm still wrestling with it today. The code was an absolute mess last year and now it's better, but still needs plenty of work: just yesterday I decoupled WAD parsing from the rest of the code properly (https://github.com/cristicbz/rust-doom/pull/53).
I'm still learning a lot a year after dedicating all my free-time programming to Rust.
I have a sinking feeling: https://github.com/cristicbz/rust-doom/blob/master/src/game/...
In Rust-Doom: A Doom renderer in Rust, with no unsafe codeRust-Doom: A Doom renderer in Rust, with no unsafe code
262 points · Open discussionI agree with many of your points actually. But I wrote the Doom renderer in rust at https://github.com/cristicbz/rust-doom and it's not a port, it's written from scratch based on specs, so maybe your argument is correct in general, but it really doesn't apply to it: it has very little unsafe code, some which really shouldn't be:
1. A tiny function which loads textures. I was fooling around with optimising load speeds. The actual speedup I got was insignificant and I really should revert it to safe code.
2. A silly getter on the transformation matrix---another misguided attempt at a speedup; no reason to use UnsafeCell instead of RefCell. Should revert.
3. Casting buffers from files as structs. This is safe for any buffer the same size as a Copy struct, std offers no such function, so I do. Unsafety is isolated in two small functions (one
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for T and one for Vec<T>), all its callers are safe.
4. Interacting with OpenGL. Fair enough, this happens all over the place, but it's not actually unsafe. The OpenGL bindings library didn't take much care to only mark unsafe operations as such, and all GL calls are marekd unsafe---which is why I wrap them up in a macro which peforms the operation in an unsafe block and panics on any error. I should port my code to glium and then this would go away as well.
*better formatting
I'm pretty stoked about this. I've been following Rust since 0.4, and it's been super fun to play around with. I have two major problems with it, but none of them are Rust's fault -- purely flaws of my own:
1) I have no idea what to do with it. I'm primarily a web developer, and I really want to get into systems programming, but I have no idea what to do with it or where to start. I wound up implementing about 50 different Rosetta Code things in Rust 0.9 and 0.10, but I still never came up with a really solid use-case that I could start and finish.
That said, I've been really impressed by rust-doom (https://github.com/cristicbz/rust-doom) and the new Iota editor (https://github.com/gchp/iota), and I wish I had the know-how to even start down that path.
2) Given that the last time I touched systems programming was in college (15 years ago)
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, I've found it difficult to wrap my head around some of the concepts (ownership in particular). I actually hung out in the IRC chat room for awhile, but I felt more than a few times that people were treating me like an idiot because of my questions ("Ha! You did X? Why in the world would you do that??"), so I wound up not really going back. I'm sure it was all my imagination and that I'm just being sensitive, but I think it would be very helpful to have more people interested in getting new people on board -- specifically people like me, with over a decade of programming experience in higher-level languages.
I guess the TLDR of this is: I love Rust, but I don't know what to do with it.
Congrats to the Rust team, though. 1.0 is a huge milestone. Good job!
A Doom Renderer written in Rust
229 points · Open discussion