Before we do anything else, we start a repository. Nothing fancy, I’ll use some default github presets, along with my standard bits and pieces.

A lawyer once told me that Apache 2 is the sensible default license so we’ll start with that. I’ll be the only contributor to this repository, and I can freely relicense in the future as long as that’s the case.

I think everyone who’s been in the game for a while has their own standard starting repository configuration. I try to hew pretty closely to the “happy path” of my tools, since it’s easier to refactor away from the happy path than to start there and try to get back.

The first choice in any project is the language, which is closely tied to the second question, whether to work top-down or bottom-up. I’m a bottom-up guy, and the legitimate hotness for low-level systems programming these days is Rust. I don’t know Rust very well, I’ve written maybe a couple of thousands of lines total, but most programming languages are similar enough that after your first twenty or thirty they start to rhyme nicely.

Rust provides a project source and build manager called cargo, and I’ll use that to set up the world.

cargo init .

Cargo sets this up as a binary project; that might or might not be right for us; we’ll see as we go.

Cargo follows the convention that a project starts in a src directory. That’s not my usual style, but we’ll roll with it while we get our bearings.

This blog post corresponds to repository state post_02

Lunar metadata: This is an expansion phase; the scope of the codebase grows.