Building chematic: Why I Wrote a Pure-Rust Cheminformatics Library from Scratch (opens in new tab)

I'm building chematic, a cheminformatics library in pure Rust, from scratch. Here's why I started, and what kept tripping me up along the way. How it started "I just want to run RDKit in the browser" — that was it. RDKit.js exists. But the WASM binary is over 30 MB, and building it requires cmake, clang, and the Emscripten SDK. CI kept breaking, Docker images bloated, and every deploy meant setting up the build environment again. Too much overhead for what I wanted to do. I tried OCL.js (Open...