qlock-rs is a text-based clock that displays the time by lighting up letters using ANSI escape sequences, and... the background text is a source code of itself, i.e. a quine.
It is inspired by the YouTube video by Tsoding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plFwBqBYpcY, which is inspired by JavaScript version https://x.com/aemkei/status/1795573193559994505 from Martin Kleppe.
cargo xtask run
will "compile" the qlock_base.rs into qlock.rs, and run it. The "compiler" minifies the qlock_base.rs and embeds source code to make qlock.rs quine.
The project actually includes two programs, qlock_base.rs and quine_base.rs. quine_base.rs is a proof of concept to check the "compiler" works as intended. It is neither a clock nor used in the qlock.
cargo xtask compile
compiles qlock_base.rs and quine_base.rs into qlock.rs and quine.rs, respectively. The generated code are quine.
cargo xtask diff
will compare quine.rs and its output to ensure the "compiled" code is a quine.
It is based on the same idea in the YouTube video by Tsoding, though I picked ~ as a "self-printing" operator instead of ? to make use of debug output feature {:?} in Rust. It is the "compiler" that replaces ~ with the minified version of the source code while he hand-crafted this in his video.
MIT License