Final thoughts

This was a fun experience! It’s quite a bit different from what I’m used to, as I usually make tools that are strictly function and useful in my own life. This project, though, was quite the opposite. I imagine I won’t be playing this tetris game in my terminal much after I complete the project, and I don’t expect others to do so either. This was mostly just a learning experience.

Well, how did the project do? Not too well, not a lot of people played, but that’s no big deal I don’t think, this project was mainly just for me to learn a bit of Rust.

And learn I did! I learned quite a few things over the course of this project.

• Rust! I completed an entire project with it. I battled against the borrow checker, used plenty of closures, used enums, experienced the power of the match statement, wrote basic composition, used a box, used the dynamic trait type, and plenty more. If learning Rust was like a day trip, I’d say I managed to do most of the important activities.
  • As for the language itself, I quite like the language design! It has all the modern features that are severely lacking in other languages I’ve used. For example:
    • Versatile match statement, I’ve only seen something like this in Python 3.10+.
    • Return errors as values. Really nice as it makes control flow and error handling explicit, but also they managed to do it without needing an if statement after every single line of code.
    • Composition! It’s a very cool concept and probably even a better alternative to inheritance.
    • I don’t know what it’s called, but I can add methods to other classes using trait implementations. Very cool concept.
• Ratatui! The most popular and probably the best terminal UI library out there. Its API was very intuitive, and I picked it up quickly due to my webdev experience in the past.
  • I implemented basic layouts using the terminal UI, and it was simple yet very fun!
  • Ratatui has a lot of features similar to CSS. For example it can handle centering entire layouts natively (not just text!), very similar to CSS Flexbox, and has a Fill constraint that fills a fraction of the available space within its container, similar to CSS Grid.
  • Unfortunately I still hardcoded a lot of the layouts using fixed lengths and had to update them whenever I wanted to change it. This is because Ratatui doesn’t have a constraint that sets the layout’s height to the minimum possible height of its children, sorta like CSS height: fit-content.
• I didn’t make any assets this time. Nonetheless, I still used a bit of FFmpeg and ImageMagick to create animated demos and whatnot.

Anyway, this was a pretty fun experience. Cool, that’s it for today! I can finally move on to another project.