My niche Rust project now competes with Microsoft
By José Díaz • 3 minutes read •
Table of Contents
My project
BoquilaHUB is a Rust project that lets you run and deploy computer vision and bioacoustics models, useful for camera traps and bioacoustics, it comes with a GUI, a CLI and a bunch of other things. Now, Microsoft is doing Sparrow, reading the original engine proposal it sounded very familiar. Essentially we do a lot of similar things, we both use Axum, ORT, have a CLI with similar purpose (mine is missing a few features). Both projects are developed in a way that is easy to build bindings for other languages, they ship those bindings, we don't.
We both ship many relevant models, bioclip2, perch2, dinov3, speciesnet, and so on. (I did it first btw)
They ship a GUI experience called Sparrow Studio that I couldn't open because my computer doesn't have .NET Runtime or something. At least this doesn't happen with my binaries (on Windows) it just runs. I think it helps that everything in Boquila is in Rust and not C# calling Rust to give you a GUI experience.
Projects that inspire me to keep going
File pilot
Written by one guy in Croatia, file pilot is a better alternative to the native file explorer in Windows. It's so much better, faster, better designed that now even Microsoft is using it as a benchmark to improve file explorer. That's insane,
TaskSlinger
Just a hobby project that went semi-viral on Twitter. I didn't think there was anything wrong with the task manager, it feels fast, I can do 2 or 3 clicks and see what I want and that's it. But TaskSlinger really makes you think how better things can be. It's just a change in taste and gives you a much better experience if you are a developer and need to see and understand things deeply
Zed
Vscode fell asleep, Zed won, it's not even a competition. It's not just taste here, it's extreme passion for their craft, they built their own UI library, their own renderer code, and more. And you can feel it.
The other things
Just like those astronauts said 'I have two Microsoft Outlooks and neither one of those is working’, and I get it completely, and I'm in my computer on a good internet.
One time during the pandemic, I rejected a meeting just because the other person insisted on having it in Microsoft Teams, back then it would take 1 minute to open, now I think it takes 30 seconds.
What good GUI app has Microsoft launched in the past 10 years?
Ok, about AI, Microsoft did train some models, but actually fumbled Megadetector V6, it's worse than V5. I think they fell for the propaganda that every YOLO version is better than the previous one. Dan Morris at Google built (by himself) Megadetector v1000 as a successor of MDv5 and it's actually better.
Anyway
This sparrow thing is like 50-60k LOC (ignoring vendoring), BoquilaHUB is closer to 11k and we ship a GUI, CLI, TUI, 8 languages, an audio player, a video player (without audio tho), feed processing, deploy REST endpoints, connect to other REST endpoints, and I'm pretty sure I can delete 2k LOC soon.
I think I can keep going