Why I'm Building This

I started this project as a way to actually learn Rust, not just skim through a tutorial and call it done. EVE Online has always inspired me with the sheer vastness of its world. I don’t expect to capture even a measurable fraction of that scale, but it’s an excellent foundation and testbed for exploring what Rust is capable of: performance, systems-level thinking, and handling the kind of large-scale server load a platform like that demands. It’s a language that’s as fast as it is new, and honestly, a little scary to me.

This blog is where I’ll keep a log of that journey: learning Rust, and how it ties back into building this project.

A few things up front:

• This is not a competitor to EVE Online, and it never will be. It’s a solo learning project.
• I’m not affiliated with CCP Games in any way.
• I have basically no prior experience with Rust. I’ve written games before, but always in garbage-collected languages. This is my first real attempt at systems programming.

Learning Rust so far

I’m already a fan. A lot of the “gotchas” people warned me about turn out to make a lot of sense once you see why they exist in the first place. The safety guarantees click in a way I wasn’t expecting, and I get why people love this language so much. Whether the frustrations hold up over time, I honestly don’t know yet. Ask me again in a few months. But the early impression is a good one.

Why Tauri

I’ve got a lot of experience in standard web dev (Angular, React), so building this on Tauri feels like a natural fit. It’s a Rust backend with a web-based frontend, native-feeling without committing to a full Electron-sized binary. That means I can lean on the web tech I already know for the UI, while forcing myself to write the actual simulation logic in Rust. No escape hatches. This could easily have been just another web project, but like Rust itself, it’s a good excuse to learn something new.

What’s next for me

The plan for the first few devlog entries is to cover:

1. Getting a bare Tauri shell running and talking to a Rust backend.
2. Modeling the first pass at a solar system / entity data structure.
3. Whatever the borrow checker breaks me on along the way.

Expect this devlog to be as much about mistakes as milestones.