When people say Rust is a “safe language”, they often mean memory safety. And while memory safety is a great start, it’s far from all it takes to build robust applications.

I write type safe generic data structures in C using a technique that I haven't seen elsewhere. It involves unions and typeof, but we'll get to that. My approach works for any type of data structure: maps, arrays, binary trees… but for this article I illustrate the ideas by implementing a basic linked list.

This tech demo explores creating a destructible, procedurally generated spherical world with Minecraft-style blocks in the Unity engine. The central challenge involves mapping a cubic grid onto a sphere without major distortion, which is solved using a "quad sphere" technique that projects a cube's faces outward. To handle distortion at varying depths, the planet is built from concentric shells, where outer layers have more blocks than inner ones to keep block size consistent. The project also required developing custom player gravity that pulls towards the planet's core, using 3D noise for seamless terrain generation, and creating a system for placing structures that can navigate the complex geometry between the planet's different sectors and shells.