Back to the Rust programming language, again

So, This is an another post about my struggle to push my little personal programming project forward. I’m currently trying to make a point & click game with 3D graphics. I started this project a long, long time ago mainly because I wanted to learn how a computer does images from 3D models and found this topic insanely interesting.

But before starting it I tried to learn a little bit:

I’ve wrote an one weekend ray tracer in Rust using this tutorial:

=> https://raytracing.github.io/

And it was really fun.

I started to learn about OpenGL, Vulkan, and wgpu.

=> https://vulkan-tutorial.com/

I went through this tutorial to the point where a triangle displayed on a screen. But I’ve used C++ for it because while doing the ray tracer I noticed that translating C++ to Rust at the same time I’m trying to understand how things are working takes too much of my brain cycles.

Everything went smoothly up to this point. It was fun. It was fulfilling. I was feeling alive.

At that point I was neither thinking seriously about APIs (OpenGL, Vulkan, wgpu) nor about programming languages.

But I wanted to make the next step: A little bit harder project without a tutorial hand-holding my whole journey. So I started to think about all of those topics and tried to choose a programming language and an API which I should use for it. And this was the point I got stuck for really long time.

I’ve decided to use wgpu and Rust at first because Vulkan is a little bit too verbose.

But:

=> 2023-09-07 – I’ve ditched Rust after serde_derive binary blob drama. | 2024-01-06 – I went back to Rust after actually trying to use Hare and finding it not mature enough for my use case. | 2024-04-19 – I left Rust after xz incident which made me think that crates.io combined with many dependencies and automatically running build.rs is really bad choice.

But then I failed to productively use Hare for the second time. After around three months I had nothing impressive to show. Just a window with a triangle.

The thing that took me less than hour in Rust with help of wgpu.

Using quick approximation I would have first basic interactive scene around year 2400.

This sucks. I felt drained.

While I value simplicity. What gives me the most fun in life is actually making things. And now I really feel that my ideals makes me unhappy.

This way I would get severe depression before the end of year.

The definition of a fun little personal project really didn’t matched that situation at all. So I decided that it is not worth it. I want to have fun! So, I decided to stop overthinking things and came back to using tools which make me feel productive. But I was feeling so burnt out that typing code was a struggle. So what took me minutes, now taking me hours or days. I’m spending enormous amount time procrastinating, again.

But some time ago I once again felt the spark of joy.

=> Because two happy little squares showed on the screen.

I really fucked up overthinking things and wasting my whole motivation to the point of total burn-out, and now it will take long time to heal myself from it. But this little spark of joy shows me that it is still possible.

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