rust systems
one cargo workspace, many small crates: ports, deterministic cores, and effectful shells.
rust earns its keep when the system underneath it is honest: small crates with one job each, pure deterministic cores, and every effect pushed behind a port the tests can fake. the lessons here come from a 25-crate peer-to-peer workspace, a simulation engine, and a shared desktop foundation.
this category is about rust as it is actually practiced in these repos: boundary discipline, closed error sets, parse-don't-validate at every foreign edge, and the build and test machinery that keeps a workspace that size legible.
lessons
- how we split a p2p system into 25 crates (and the rules that survived) — a crate earns its boundary or it doesn't get one
- when to make something a crate instead of a module — the decision the tutorials skip
- deterministic cores, effectful shellssubscriber — pure logic in the middle, every effect behind a port
- closed error sets and parsing from unknown — every foreign value is hostile until parsed
- a desktop app around a headless rust core — the menu bar is a shell too
projects
- valhalla — a peer-to-peer network for agents built as a workspace of small crates.
- desktop-foundation — the shared menu-bar native base several products build on.
- platonik — a deterministic organism engine with a rust core and cli.
- aicharts — a benchmark publication with rust crates under the hood.
AI-drafted at Ben Guo's direct request as category seeds; each lesson page is reviewed against the source repositories before publication.