🦀 Finally a Stable Game Engine
Today’s issue: Rust 1.94.1 Is Out, a Guitar Trainer Running on an ESP32, and a Spicy Revisit of “Are Mutexes Slow?”
Hello Rustaceans!
In this issue, we’ll discuss the recent stable released of Fyrox, share a Rust tip, spotlight an amazing project, and share 10 incredible links of the week.
Here’s issue 112.
MAIN NEWS
Finally a Stable Game Engine
One persistent challenge with Rust in game development is that most game engines built in it are not yet fully stable.
Some game studios have often faced issues with slow iteration cycles and friction with the borrow checker and left Rust behind because of this.
It remains one of the frontiers where Rust is still lacking, though several teams are actively working to improve the situation.
Lightweight 2D options like ggez and Macroquad appeared early, while Bevy rose with its powerful ECS and code-first philosophy.
Fyrox (formerly rg3d) took a bolder path: a complete, visual editor that feels like Unity.
After seven years of dedicated work by a small, mostly unfunded team, Fyrox has finally shipped its first stable release. Rust game engines have come far since the early days of Piston and ggez.
This release of Fyrox is massive compared to 0.36.
Here’s what I like from this release:
Project Export CLI for real team workflows. Every project now includes an export-cli crate that enables seamless CI/CD pipelines, automated QA builds, and easy targeting of PC, WebAssembly, or Android.
Polished editor experience. New Input Box widget for clean text input dialogs, elegant text trimming with ellipsis, exit confirmation dialogs, and improved Animation/ABSM editors.
Modernized scene loading. Refactored to async tasks for most cases, while still offering full manual control when needed.
Production-ready maturity. VRAM optimizations, better shadows, UI consistency that make Fyrox feel complete rather than experimental.
What makes Fyrox 1.0 special is the balance it strikes. Bevy excels at raw flexibility and performance for code-heavy developers, but Fyrox delivers a visual editor that artists and designers can actually use.
Fyrox 1.0 has transformed a long-running passion project into a mature, ship-ready tool.
It’s the closest thing Rust has to a true Unity alternative. The heavy lifting is complete and Rust gamedev just reached a major milestone.
Huge kudos to the entire Fyrox team, you guys are absolutely amazing!
RUST TIP 🦀
Last week we shared a tip on how to export commonly-used items in a prelude module.
#[track_caller] + std::panic::Location for god-tier debugging in libraries
Want your library’s error messages/panics/logs to point to the user’s code, not your internal helper?
#[track_caller]
pub fn my_library_function() {
let location = std::panic::Location::caller();
println!("called from {}:{}", location.file(), location.line());
}I put this on every public-facing helper that could fail. Makes debugging 10× nicer for downstream users.
Also works beautifully with anyhow! or thiserror.
Check out and run the example on Rust Playground.
PROJECT SPOTLIGHT 💡
hotpath-rs
Hotpath-rs is an easy-to-configure Rust performance profiler that shows exactly where your code spends time and allocates.
It solves the classic problem: you know something’s slow, but good luck figuring out exactly which innocent-looking function or channel is quietly murdering your latency.
What makes it fun to use:
Memory tracking. See exactly how many bytes (and allocations) each function is responsible for, including nested calls.
Live TUI dashboard. Watch your channels, futures, and Tokio workers in real time, built with ratatui.
MCP server for AI agents. Your LLM can now interrogate your running program about its own performance.
Throw in static reports, GitHub Actions regression checks, and seamless async instrumentation, and you’ve got a profiler that respects your time.
Hotpath-rs is open-source on GitHub at https://github.com/pawurb/hotpath-rs.
AWESOME LINKS OF THE WEEK 🔗
Rust 1.94.1 is out and fixes three regressions from 1.94.0 and addresses two Cargo security issues (CVEs). Rust Foundation published their Q1 recap: hired infra help, shipped cargo-capslock and crates.io vuln tab, pushed C++ interop, and RustConf is nearing. Also, the Rust Security Response Team released a security advisory for Cargo: malicious tar crates could chmod arbitrary directories during builds (CVE-2026-33056).
VectorWare made Rust’s std::thread run natively on GPUs by mapping threads to warps, enabling familiar concurrency for ecosystem libraries. (If you remember we wrote about them in issue 107).
BoxyUwU wrote how coherence and orphan rules are crippling Rust’s ecosystem evolution. He proposes “incoherent traits” with named impls to finally let alternatives to serde thrive without forking everything.
Jon Gjengset (Author Rust for Rustaceans) gave a talk at Jane Street called “Are Mutexes Slow?”, spoiler: You’ll probably enjoy this one. [video]
Anthropic open sourced buffa, a Rust implementation of protobuf with editions support, JSON serialization, and zero-copy views.
Ubuntu will switch to memory-safe Rust-based ntpd-rs (with Statime PTP) as default time sync, replacing chrony, linuxptp, and possibly gpsd, starting in 26.10/27.04.
The Dallas Rust User Meetup will take place on April 5th. They’ll be discussing Rust-based implementations of deep learning.
In other news, Canonical (Org behind Ubuntu) joined the Rust Foundation as a Gold Member.
Orhun Parmaksız just casually shipped Tuitar, a Rust-powered guitar trainer running on an ESP32. It’s got a slick Ratatui TUI, real-time pitch detection, a fretboard, and even song practice modes.
The writeup on Roots of unity shows how to enable O(N log N) NTT polynomial evaluation via butterfly recursion in finite fields, powering fast zkSNARK circuits in Rust.
CodeCrafters: Become a Better Rust Engineer
CodeCrafters created amazing Rust courses that push your skills beyond the basics.
You’ll have fun building real-world projects from scratch, including Git, Docker, Redis, Kafka, SQLite, Grep, BitTorrent, HTTP Server, an Interpreter, and DNS.
The courses are self-paced, so you can learn at your own speed.
Join for free and get 40% off when you upgrade. [affiliate]
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Been listening to Future looks good by One republic while editing this piece. It’s a good jam.
See you next week Rustaceans.
John & Elley.