Heavy industry for the web.
Ferramenta — Italian for hardware store — is a family of Rust-native tools built around standards and APIs developers already know. Each project is re-engineered in Rust; where an established predecessor exists, compatibility is checked differentially and performance is measured in the open.
The content pipeline
Three tools, one chain: a regex engine drives a highlighter, the highlighter feeds a Markdown renderer. Markdown with code goes in, highlighted HTML comes out — end to end in Rust, with each stage measured against the contract it succeeds.
The language workshop
Spelling and translation, treated as engineering problems: deterministic, diffable, verifiable. Two engines, plus the application they carry — palamedes is the i18n toolchain built on this family, and the reason the engines have to hold.
On the workbench
Three more tools taking shape — early, cut from the same steel, and explicit about what is proven now and what is still on the bench.
What earns the stamp
Proven, not promised
Where a tool succeeds an established implementation, differential suites measure it against that reference — from Hunspell and Shiki to SVGO and Oniguruma. Claims stay tied to current evidence and maturity.
Open standards first
CommonMark and GFM, PO and ICU MessageFormat, Hunspell dictionaries, TextMate grammars. We build on what the ecosystem already agreed on — never on formats only we control.
Familiar contracts
Compatibility is earned tool by tool. Stable projects can be adopted against familiar contracts; alpha and early tools show the standard they are working toward.
Safe defaults
Rust cores without a C toolchain — memory-layout-tuned, SIMD and NEON where it pays. Sanitized output, bounded memory and time: production behavior out of the box.
Why this store exists
We’ve been handed good tools all our lives. Time to forge some back.
Open source shaped our careers — from leading qooxdoo at 1&1 more than a decade ago to the tools we still rely on every day. Ferramenta is how we give back: one workshop, building the boring, load-bearing parts properly.
Essential developer tooling is going native — Rust mostly, sometimes Go. Vite, SWC, OXC and esbuild showed what happens when the tools everything else stands on stop being slow. That movement isn’t ours: we stand on its shoulders. Ferramenta adds the pieces we know best — not mechanical ports, but engines rebuilt the way you’d design them for Rust today: memory-layout-conscious, SIMD and NEON where it pays, allocation-free where it counts.
- Stable through evidence. Every tool earns stability through evidence appropriate to its contract — ferroni, ferrocat and palamedes are stable today; the rest keep their maturity visible.
- Match before outrun. Where there is a predecessor contract, compatibility comes first and performance claims follow published benchmarks — never a compatibility asterisk.
- One chain, all Rust. Markdown with highlighted code, end to end — regex, highlighting, rendering — without a C toolchain or a JS runtime.
