I have never used Turbo Pascal - Wikipedia , but have often heard of it referred to in legendary terms, especially with regards to its compile time.
Are there any efforts to rewrite the Turbo Pascal / C class of compiler / IDEs in Rust ? I'm mainly curious what a modern port of those TUIs would be like (and how blazingly fast they would be on modern hardware).
I used TurboPascal, TurboC/C++ and even Turbo Assembler or TASM. I really don’t know if they were that fast. I can imagine that you should take into account that you would compile for a very different environment than you would today. I mainly worked in a MS/DOS (with a Novell LAN maybe) environment. Before 3.1 MS Windows wasn’t very relevant in that time as I remember it. Internet certainly didn’t play a role.
I have skipped a few years without any programming, and C is still C. Rust is more difficult, but the biggest change, to me, is the distance between the programmer and the computer. MS/DOS was single user, almost single task, with direct access to the OS, the BIOS and the hardware.
I can imagine a modern compiler for a modern *nix type or NT type O/S has a lot more work to do. I am absolutely no expert, so maybe this is nonsense, but I really think it will be hard to make a fair comparison between then and now.
I guess there is not much motivation to recreate those TUI IDE's in Rust.
However there are a lot of command line and TUI advocates who suggest using vim as the editor and installing various plugins to support Rust syntax highlighting, the rust-analyser, debuggers, all sorts of things. That would get you the fast text based TUI experience.
Actually now there is neovim which gets rave reviews for this: GitHub - mrcjkb/rustaceanvim: Supercharge your Rust experience in Neovim! A heavily modified fork of rust-tools.nvim
The attraction to Turbo Pascal/C was a lot to do with the speed of the compiler never mind the IDE. The pascal language in particular is amenable to fast compilation. No TUI IDE is going to help get Rust compiling faster.
The core of the Turbo Pascal compiler was written in optimised Assembler, the parsing, code generation and linking was done in a single pass.
If you rewrote it in Rust the end product would be slower.
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