Writing a CAD Language in Rust (with Adam Chalmers)

Given how many languages have been written in C over the years, it’s not surprising to see new languages being written in Rust. What is surprising about this week’s guest is the domain he’s writing for: Computer Aided Design (CAD). Could Rust be sneaking its way into the CAD world too?

Joining me to discuss the design and implementation of a CAD programming language is Adam Chalmers. He works at Zoo, developing KCL - a language that looks like JavaScript, runs on Rust, and offers users a seamless hybrid experience of both coding and point-and-click modelling. So, how does that all fit together?

In this episode we look at the design and implementation of a programming language in Rust; how KittyCAD creates that hybrid environment for text-based programming and point-and-click modelling; and how we can learn to write our own Rust-interpreted languages.

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Adam’s Blog: https://adamchalmers.com/
Adam’s Guide To Writing Parsers:    • Zoo's Rust Club [Episode 1] - How to ...  
Zoo’s Modelling App: https://zoo.dev/modeling-app
Mechanical CAD: https://zoo.dev/blog/mechanical-cad-y...
A Lego brick in KCL: https://zoo.dev/docs/kcl-samples/lego
Winnow: https://docs.rs/winnow/latest/winnow/
Nom: https://docs.rs/nom/latest/nom/
Factorio: https://www.factorio.com/
Satisfactory: https://store.steampowered.com/app/52...
Crafting Interpreters: https://craftinginterpreters.com/
Coding in Antarctica: https://brr.fyi/

Prior art: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoLISP (Thanks to Kristoffer Björk for the link.)

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Adam on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@adam_chal@ha...

Kris on Mastodon: http://mastodon.social/@krisajenkins
Kris on LinkedIn:   / krisjenkins  
Kris on Twitter:   / krisajenkins  

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0:00 Intro
2:19 Adam's Day Job At Zoo
6:18 What Does A CAD-Specific Programming Language Look Like?
11:13 A Cloud-Centric Rendering Architecture
16:24 Digging Into The AST Design
26:35 Zoo's History With Rust
31:02 How Would I Write My Own Language?
38:23 Performance Tuning
46:30 Rust As A Reference Work
51:15 Running as WASM
56:32 Thin Client Performance Concerns
1:04:41 Rendering Over The Network With WebRTC
1:09:22 What Are Your Compile-Time Ambitions for KittyCAD?
1:18:28 Where To Learn More…
1:21:25 Outro