Rust is notorious for its slow compile times, while Turbo Pascal was known to be blazingly fast. And the debugger, one of the most important part of the experience is "Not implemented". Dressing it as a 1989 IDE makes me painfully aware of what we have lost. Despite running on hardware that were orders of magnitudes slower than today, software used to be more responsive.
By "more responsive" I mean that while modern systems are excellent at batch processing, latency is often not great, and because so much happens in parallel, also confusing.
However they aren't fashionable in the days of Electron and CLI nostalgia.
So you end up with Go on vim, instead of FreePascal on Lazarus.
I will see about the debugger.
Don't forget Haskell. And what's other... C++, OCaml, etc?
I guess a language with complex/complicated design is difficult to be compiled "blazing fast"
Zig and Go would probably be better modern languages for this. Also "Turbo Zig" and "Turbo Go" sound cool, "Trust" sounds too corporate :)
Haskell has GHCi, where you can pre-compile modules and play around in the repl with code that is more in flow.
OCaml has a bytecode interpreter, and a repl, thus you can compile only what you need, and do the full compilation for proper releases.
C++, well, yes it is slow, if you don't make use of binary libraries, external templates, incremental compilation and incremental linking, parallel builds, hot code reloading (VC++ and Live++), or REPLs (ROOT/cling, Clang-Repl).
Great article for those interested in the matter:
https://ia801901.us.archive.org/5/items/TurboPascal55/Antiqu...
> Fast! Compiles 34, 000 lines of code per minute
https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_borlandtur5.5Brochure1...
Measured on a a IBM PS/2 Model 60, meaning an Intel 80286 running at 10 MHz with 640 KB for MS-DOS, up to 8 MB depending on extenders and HMA configurations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PS/2_Model_60
And if you feel using the language complexity excuse for 2026 hardware, see OCaml, Delphi, D, or C# AOT.
Everything felt exciting and so close to really understanding what’s going on. And just seeing the blue text interface reminded me of how much fun that was…
To beat 1989 and Turbo Pascal, TRust must do that (perhaps the Rust's way).
"error: could not find 'Cargo.toml'"
I assume first need to create a project by "cargo new" ...?
Anyway, love the good ol' Turbo Pascal 7 Reference. Haven't touch it for more than 1 decade.
I realize the author is probably just having fun, but if a few modern features added to this and I would probably try it.
Multi cursor, a little terminal window, some way to do code hints or intelligence. This would be a dream boat lol
I started this just for the lulz, but now I've got:
copy/paste/undo
multiple cursors
debuggers
syntax highlighting (even nested languages with jetbrains style comments!)
find-in-files
integrated documentation
integrated git client (roughly modeled after lazygit)
spell checking
and tons more that I can't even remember
