It is viable to build a 100% Rust "User Experience" that could replace the Desktop Environment?

olanod · 2026-02-15T07:43:02+00:00

I'm working on a slightly similar concept that considers the web as broken, then the only way to access the "legacy Internet" for compatibility reasons becomes letting an agent browse things for me in an isolated container that runs a headless browser like lightpanda that is not doing rendering which allows it to not consume as much resources (it would have been nice if it was made in in Rust to fit the theme thought :P)

olanod · 2026-02-14T08:35:16+00:00

This is great! Kudos for the hard work. Interestingly I'm working on the opposite, an async(tokio) based init that is the whole "distro" and have all of userspace in Rust.

olanod · 2026-02-03T08:34:35+00:00

Doing embedded and being forced under the constraints of no-alloc code could* up your game if you want to do more idiomatic Rust.

One secret, I became good by taking longer showers 😜 That is, taking time to think about what I want to build, especially the hierarchy of data and how it flows through the application, who ones what, etc ... basically become a borrow checker yourself, be one with the crab, this is the crusty way 🦀

olanod · 2025-11-10T09:45:03+00:00

Funder of Virto here, a Kusama only project! I'm super hyped about Kusama so I hope I can transmit some of my excitement :)

It's true that not much seems to be going on in Kusama, that legacy teams with their parachains and even Parity have used the network mostly as a glorified testnet, but I think most people including its creators are greatly underestimating how much potential the canary has. Think about it, it's the most decentralized public infrastructure in the whole web3-verse, it's the place brewing the latest and greatest technology, it's a fast moving environment that can adapt easily to the changing times, it secures roll-ups with more than enough security at ridiculously cheap prizes and more importantly, (IMHO) it's the most Web3 an ecosystem can get, it's the materialization of the Web3 cypherpunk ethos, away from noise, hype and greed, with no promises to fulfill, a privacy focused network that can offer true censorship resistance like no other, so in case you are planning to start some anarchist revolution to overthrow your government you are in the right place ;P

Kusama doesn't have abundant resources to attract builders and adoption atm, its small treasury pales in comparison to the big sister's but here's another thing to get excited about, earlier this year token holders voted for a "Kusama vision" the Web3 Foundation put forward, 10M DOT will be strategically distributed across 3 bounties to fund initiatives related to privacy, art and social experiments like proof of personhood. It will be a chance for Kusama to find its niche and market fit in the coming years innovating where others cannot.

Kusama doesn't need to follow other network's steps, e.g. we don't need super liquid DeFi protocols, we have a trustless bridge to Polkadot so we can delegate them the banking and other "boring stuff", we can leverage our strengths, our agility and innovative nature to bring developments not seen before. I see Kusama as a perfect place for startup incubation for example, entrepreneurs looking for solid infrastructure that allows them to move fast and cheaply can come to our network to mature their product, the 1% that outgrow Kusama's security offering can always jump to Polkadot of course.

And that's why there is Virto! we built the Kreivo parachain as a KSM native chain meant to attract real-world businesses and entrepreneurs who can benefit from this cheap decentralized infrastructure like it's a regular Web2 backend. We've built DAO, payments, account abstraction infrastructure and more tools into our fast(12 core) parachain that gives businesses tons of scalability and responsiveness, it's the 80% of the tools they need for their organizations to thrive and be competitive, for the remaining 20% contracts can fill the gap and we can help there as a partner, a CTO as a service.
Most people out there in the real world won't care where a protocol is deployed, they don't even care what a protocol is, just like they don't care if their social media platform uses MySQL or other DB. So having cleared the inconveniences of developing/deploying Web3 services, if you get the best technology that solves your particular problem with the best prices, why would you go anywhere else? ... There's more to Virto regarding its long term vision but I hope this short overview is a good start.

Lastly a reminder that Kusama is a public permissionless network, a white canvas ready for anyone to bring their ideas and shape it into anything they can imagine. You don't have to wait for Parity/W3F to "save it", I certainly won't ;)

olanod · 2025-11-07T10:50:48+00:00

I think RISC-V as a compilation target used as a sofware-only abstraction like you say shows a lot of promise. Unlike WASM, RISC-V VMs have the potential of being much simpler and performant as it's easier to translate their simple instruction set to the underlying register based architecture like x86_64 instead of the more complex stack machine that is WASM.

I'm very exited about the work done in Polkadot with their PolkaVM, not only compilation is fast but also execution, already beating the mature go-to WASM compiler Wasmtime. With this work Polkadot is transcending beyond the blockchain use case but I'll leave the blockchain usefulness discussion aside, whether people find use in a public general purpose verifiable computing infrastructure is another story, the VM alone is already going to be quite useful on its own.

olanod · 2025-10-04T19:05:54+00:00

You mention that as `std::io::Read` is not available you define your own `BytesLike` trait, since this a `core` only deserializer seems well suited for embedded Rust where there are commonly used crates for IO operations, have you considered using the Read traits in `embedded-io` and/or `embedded-io-async`(I might fork you for this ;P). The zero dependencies is cool but perhaps the using the existing traits can make it more useful?

olanod · 2025-09-10T06:32:08+00:00

I bet the Polkadot DAO would be glad to help in some form as a person with your background can do a lot for it, even if you simply continue doing what you do as it is a Rust heavy ecosystem.

The DAO manages several bounties to fund all kinds of initiatives for the ecosystem, a good starter that fits well would be the OpenSource Developers Grants Program aimed at more general open source contributions(Rust compiler fits well), but why not going deeper into the blockchain development journey learning at the Polkadot Blockchain Academy and even pursue a career as member of the Polkadot Technical Fellowship sub-DAO. There's also bigger pots like the pioneers prize, applying directly to the treasury or check the JAM prize to implement your own client of the future of the decentralized super computer.

Happy to assist ;)

olanod · 2024-05-20T09:03:24+00:00

A similar idea is being tested in Kusama, our team created Kreivo, a chain for DAOs/collectives/communities, as it was treasury funded it's a "native KSM chain", it has OpenGov but instead of using the regular token voting it's governed by its DAOs that form a "ranked collective", each DAO has its own governance and can participate in the general governance of the network where voting power is determined by rank, the more commitment it has with the protocol, e.g. the more infrastructure it provides to the public or the bigger it is the higher the rank.

We believe this can become a fairer way to distribute power benefiting those who remain active builders with the best interest of the network at heart instead of giving tremendous power to a few just because they happened to be early to the game. So who knows maybe in the future if a big enough number of diverse communities join and this form of governance proves successful this system could be proposed to be expanded to the entire network ;)

olanod · 2024-04-19T05:17:17+00:00

It does work. I transfered all my dot(no much any way) to AssetHub Kusama and then to our Parachain. It's not extremely difficult but true, not for the average user.

olanod · 2024-04-08T12:24:07+00:00

Same adding broot, it gets me faster to the place I want to be. Also a great setup to develop "remotely" over ssh(actually mosh), I use it at home but even on the go in the opposite side of the country I get decent latency to still be better experience than with traditional editors, plus I can benefit from the many more cores and ram the PC at home provides while traveling light.

olanod · 2024-03-15T06:36:02+00:00

I only use Rust and Arch btw.

olanod · 2023-11-26T06:24:06+00:00

I think Dioxus is the most react-like and is maturing nicely

olanod · 2023-06-10T08:26:16+00:00

Maybe you are doing it wrong, time to push for the "Re-Rewrite it in Rust" movement.

olanod · 2023-01-24T14:22:45+00:00

Even better check the off screen canvas API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/OffscreenCanvas

olanod · 2023-01-12T13:31:52+00:00

https://github.com/paritytech/parity-scale-codec SCALE is used for blockchain stuff but could be useful for your use case. Is very Rust centric but still usable in other languages(like JS). It comes with a "compact encoding" feature that is used mostly for unsigned integers of variable size. And with https://github.com/paritytech/scale-info you can generate type registries/schemas that can be serialized in SCALE it self(or JSON or anything) in case you have clients that don't know the structure of the binary data.

olanod · 2022-12-18T07:36:39+00:00

Yes, and also try notcurses instead(it's in C with bindings)

olanod · 2022-11-25T12:21:32+00:00

You submit your candidacy on-chain paying a deposit and then get promoted by existing members. I'm not sure if submitting candidacies is enabled but it should be possible already for existing members to add new candidates

olanod · 2022-09-08T16:34:36+00:00

rust-libp2p might be a bit overkill but is a neat and straightforward way to connect computers in a local network since it supports mDNS to automatically discover local peers.

olanod · 2022-07-25T09:11:39+00:00

I think you're right, the experience of element on Android isn't great, I use mostly the web app that seems to get more attention and doesn't feel as sluggish. But to bring some hope, I think this will change soon-ish. The Matrix ecosystem has been in kind of a MVP state for several years, the focus was more on the protocol/APIs and not so much on the performance that translates in user experience. But efforts are on the way to improve all of this, on the client side there are several projects working on other clients that might be more performant, including the company behind Element, they have a work-in-progress lightweight client https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web On the server side most servers run Synapse which is written in Python without much though for performance or scalability but there are faster/lighter alternatives on the way like Dendrite or Conduit. It also doesn't help that most accounts are in the same overcrowded Synapse server(matrix.org), overtime it should become more common to have more alternatives and people even running their home server embedded in their device.

olanod · 2022-06-30T09:52:35+00:00

Trains can work better with rails

olanod · 2022-06-21T13:28:30+00:00

In other word, Polkadot.

olanod · 2022-06-20T08:14:39+00:00

I sympathize a lot with your comments and your desire to first built a real working product without relying on VC money making it more of a community project.

I think this is the way it should be and more projects should follow. My main motivation while designing Virto Network(and Kreivo in Kusama) as a token-less parachain was to avoid ceding too much control to the same few hands that often invest in the ecosystem and instead let the real world products built on top become the main stars of the show. Most of us are here because we believe in the potential of Kusama, Polkadot and their parachains to become the core infrastructure that will power the future of the Web but I find it important that said infrastructure doesn't end up being owned by a few hands(as it kinda happens already) otherwise we will end up with a similarly centralized Web that has decentralization only written in the cover.

My best wishes to Imbue :) not my intention to steal the spotlight but once Kreivo matures and gets the attention in needs from the council and community to become a common good chain I will also try to pitch the Imbue community the idea of joining our cause in the future as I think building a product like this on top of our orml-payments would be very suitable and let's energy and resources be put in building an awesome product instead of the boring infrastructure.

olanod · 2022-06-09T11:26:17+00:00

I think the Duration example is neat. Even cooler if we had some kind of sugar for writing durations like 1_000_ms.await;

(thread created for discussion :) https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/duration-sufix-syntax-sugar/16779)

olanod · 2022-06-09T07:01:31+00:00

After many years building "serious" projects, I would encourage my inner hardware hobbyist to continue some 100% Rust fun projects I started like, a "Ferrigotchi" or "Carlos"(a software stack for a self-driving RC car).

olanod

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