Building a Computer-Aided Synthesis Planning Engine in Pure Rust (opens in new tab)

I've been building renkin, a retrosynthesis engine in Pure Rust. You give it a target molecule as a SMILES string and it tries to find synthesis routes back to commercially available starting materials. Background Retrosynthesis is how organic chemists plan a synthesis: instead of asking "how do I make this?", you ask "what reaction could have produced this, and where do those precursors come from?" — working backwards from the target until you reach things you can actually buy. renkin automa...