Hi friends,

The majority of my programming career has been on the web, using dynamic languages like JavaScript and Clojure.

For a change of pace, I’ve been learning Rust, which requires one to think about mechanical details like pointers and memory. I never studied computer science in college, and these topics have always intimidated me — but Rust’s tooling, documentation, and community have been spectacular.

My favorite method of learning is by trying to build something, so I’ve been learning Rust by tackling a long-standing pet peeve of mine: Mousing around the “desktop”.

More specifically, I’ve been building an interface that unifies all of my computer “things” — browser tabs, OS X windows, Emacs buffers, etc. — in a keyboard-driven, searchable UI.

It might be best explained via a short demo video:

https://kevinlynagh.com/datatron/

One constraint I’ve given myself is that all user interactions must be processed and re-render within 16ms (i.e., 60 frames/sec). This constraint has forced some interesting design tradeoffs:

• What data structures let you regex search 500,000 filenames that quickly?

• How can you do async searches without having results change out from under you, an instant before you select one?

• What’s the fastest way to give Chrome a bitmap to draw, anyway?

That said, it’s been an awesome, tangible constraint that helps me keep the design focused — not to mention it’s quite satisfying to use software that that feels instant.

Given that most processors are measured in GHz — billions of times a second — it makes you wonder why we’re so often waiting for our computers at all. Turns out this is a wicked complex question, and it’s related to the gazillion layers of abstraction we programmers make for ourselves. Peep these rad articles/talks on the topic:

• Overview of what happens between your keyboard and monitor: https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/
• Awesome empirical work using a high speed camera and computers from 1977 to the present: https://danluu.com/input-lag/
• Talk on building a fast text editor: https://www.recurse.com/events/localhost-raph-levien

Anyway, for those of you around Melbourne, I’ll be speaking about this project on Feb 22 at the local Rust meetup: https://www.meetup.com/Rust-Melbourne/events/246977264/

Finally, if you want to help with beta testing, have questions/suggestions, or have an idea for a proper name and logo, just reply to this email!

Best,

Kevin