Post on rust.

Author: bobbens

content/blarg/2025-07-04_the_road_to_rust.md

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+---
+title: "The Road to Rust"
+author: Naev DevTeam
+tags: [ 'development' ]
+blurb: Naev has started to be ported to Rust, a more inherently safe language.
+---
+
+A long project in the making, the Naev DevTeam is now proud to announce that
+Naev is now partially written in [Rust programming
+language](https://www.rust-lang.org/). While still only about 5% of the C code
+has been rewritten, it includes many of the critical components such as the
+most of the rendering pipeline and initialization bits. The porting is being
+done in tandem with general development, so C and Rust will co-exist for a
+while until the port is completed and C can be dropped as necessary. Scripting
+will still be in Lua, which will be much easier to develop using
+[mlua](https://docs.rs/mlua/latest/mlua/index.html) from Rust.
+
+## What does this mean?
+
+Short-term, it means it is likely there will be more bugs and quirks, however,
+in the longer picture, this means that Naev will be able to make use of the
+inherent memory and threading safety of Rust to be much more bug-free. Rust
+also makes it possible to simplify significant parts of the code and thread
+them more easily, meaning that it is likely that performance will also go up
+over time.
+
+The porting is also a good way to revise the existing codebase. With the first
+commit being 18 years ago, as you can expect, some parts have not aged too
+well. Rewriting the code in Rust will not only help modernize it, but also
+streamline it so that many more improvements can be easily made. Some
+particular example of something that will become easily possible is
+implementing mechanisms to modify the number of outfit slots on a ship via
+outfits.
+
+## What has been done?
+
+While the port is far from over, very important aspects have already been moved
+to Rust side including initialization, rendering, and Lua scripting. Some
+low-hanging fruits have also been grabbed as a proof of concept including
+things like the 2D vector Lua library, damage types, and slot types. The entire
+build system has also been rehauled to have C and Rust work somewhat happily
+together. Besides having to file a lot of bug reports upstream to
+[meson](https://mesonbuild.com/) and other projects, we now figured it out with
+lots of not so beautiful tricks to compile both a C and Rust library
+separately, and then link them together in Rust. It's a bit hacky, but it seems
+to work well for the time being.
+
+## What can you do to help?
+
+There is a lot of work left to still be done. Good thing is that anyone can
+help! If you want to help with porting, you can look at the [issue on rust
+porting](https://github.com/naev/naev/issues/2890) that tries to centralize
+work being done on Rust. If you don't want to do Rust, you can also help as
+always by testing the nightly and reporting any issues that you may find.
+
+As always, help is also needed with artwork, sound effects, and music,
+including [graphics for
+outfits](https://github.com/naev/naev/wiki/Needed-Artwork%3A-Outfits) and [new
+portraits](https://github.com/naev/naev/wiki/Needed-Artwork%3A-Characters).