Show HN: Quake ported to safe Rust, playable in browser

Posted by ilreb |an hour ago |66 comments

hn_submit 14 minutes ago[5 more]

Are hordes of developers now going to port all sorts of open-source software to Rust using LLMs and passing it off as their own work?

I don't see any need for this. Rust is brilliant but the Quake C++ code was already more or less bug-free.

aroman an hour ago[8 more]

Oh my god, and the author even supplied a "proof"[0] visual diff harness... that it replicates the original game pixel for pixel.

Just the cherry on top of great demonstration of our collective new superpower: asking computers to do something we can describe how to do, but would (probably) never take the time to do ourselves.

[0] https://github.com/terrapapagalli1516/quake-srp/tree/main/or...

koala_man an hour ago

I would never have imagined a phone web browser capable of this in 1996 between playing Quake and testing out the hot new JavaScript powered mouse rollover image effects in Netscape Navigator 2.0

aizk 39 minutes ago[2 more]

This may sound funny but I feel games would lose a lot of fun if they were all written in rust and had classes of bugs just not available to them. For better or for worse quirks and bugs in games have shaped how people approach games, and also have given games charm for decades.

CBLT an hour ago[1 more]

Damn, no results when I grep for 0x5f3759df in the source[0].

[0] https://github.com/terrapapagalli1516/quake-srp

Uptrenda 2 minutes ago

Vibe coders need to stop trying to use the browser as a platform for complex games. It's never going to work out and will always lead to a slow, unplayable, piece of shit. If you want to make a game then just make it a desktop program... There's a reason why literally every modern game is built in this way.

franze 44 minutes ago[1 more]

ok this beats my doom minesweaper mashup [1] by far

[1] https://dreadsweeper.franzai.com/

dwroberts 25 minutes ago[1 more]

‘Safe rust’ just being used to mean ‘no unsafe’ is kind of a shallow understanding of the language. You can write code without unsafe that is not really ideal at all eg abusing vector/slice indexing to create a kind of interior mutability that the borrow checker is blind to. Which as a C port I’m going to guess it probably ends up doing

maxyurk 13 minutes ago

https://warweb.duckdns.org/

I like these

Panzerschrek an hour ago[5 more]

How? Was it a LLM-assisted rewrite?

iwassayinbourns 23 minutes ago

This is cool. Do Quake 3 next.

cush an hour ago[1 more]

It's so smooth

onion2k an hour ago[1 more]

Code lives here - https://github.com/terrapapagalli1516/quake-srp (SRP stands for 'slop rust port'.)

I think 'standing on the shoulders of giants' is the phrase for something like this. It's the confluence of browser rendering, WASM, Rust, and LLMs. For me it's less a demo of what AI can do, and more a showcase of the human effort from the past few decades on the parts that needed to fall into place for an LLM to come in at the (relatively speaking) last second and claim a win. Sure, an LLM did the port from C to Rust, but think of all the things needed for it to all work. That's pretty damn amazing, and it wasn't done with AI.

Marazan 12 minutes ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=960369

Quake in Flash player from 2009 I think

flowerthoughts an hour ago

That's darn nice. I didn't even have to push the turbo button to be able to run it on my phone.

I wholeheartedly bless this slop.

Found the repo in the Reddit post:

https://github.com/terrapapagalli1516/quake-srp

https://www.reddit.com/r/quake/comments/1x1ch14/quake_srp_sl...

parasti 17 minutes ago

I spent five years on and off porting Neverball to the web by hand and waited for the perfect moment to announce it while tweaking the UX.

Fucking missed it.