Show HN: Learning Rust by writing a Markdown to HTML compiler
Andrea, a newcomer to Rust, created a simple Markdown-to-HTML compiler as a personal learning project. The tool parses a limited set of CommonMark features, uses YAML front matter for metadata, and outputs static HTML pages with basic navigation and search capabilities. The source code is publicly available, though the author expects limited broader utility.
- ▪The author spent about 12‑13 hours building a Rust program that converts Markdown files into HTML using a custom parser and template system.
- ▪Supported Markdown elements include headings, paragraphs, code blocks, ordered and unordered lists, blockquotes, inline code, strikethrough, bold, italic, links, and images.
- ▪Each post begins with a YAML front matter block that defines title, date, description, tags, and draft status, influencing index ordering and visibility.
- ▪The generated site features a single-page index without pagination, a search bar, and Vim‑style navigation within and between posts.
Hacker News (Front Page) files mainly under programming. We currently carry 734 of its stories. Top-voted stories on Hacker News.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Andreadimatteo |
| Canonical URL | https://andreadimatteo.com/md-to-html-compiler.html |
| Publication time | Wed, 29 Jul 2026 01:04:30 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-29T01:46:14.215Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-29T01:46:14.215Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 4aLJTImLpDoH · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Hi, this is Andrea. I'm new to Rust and thought that a very pratical way to get in touch with it was writing something. I've thought of writing my own .md to .html compiler for for a while. So here we are, both my micro-blog and my project have come to life. Before even thinking of writing it, I was using Hugo. It was really nice, but you know, sometimes it's just too much, I just wanted a very simple thing, not taking a lifetime choosing a theme and other stuff, or maybe as a SWE I thought I could just build it myself, and after 12-13 hours of my not really spare time I came eventually with something. It's very basic, written with no GenAI tools, and as much docs as possible. I've implemented very basic .md syntax for now, eventually will expand later.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Andreadimatteo.
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