PyMOL-RS
Rust reimplementation of PyMOL with modern rendering
Details
- External ID
- 47164180
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- PyMOL-RS
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- Feb. 26, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 5
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.10512129380053908
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
Well, it happened. After endless release candidates, we've finally made it to v0.1.0.What's inside:GPU-accelerated rendering with WebGPU shaders, shadows, and goodies like silhouette edges and a special soft-light modeCore operations run up to 1000x faster than the original PyMOL. Surface generation that used to send you on a coffee run now finishes the moment you hit the buttonFull PyMOL selection algebra support — 95+ keywords, boolean logic, distance/expansion operators, slash-macrosDistance, angle, and dihedral measurements, atom labels — everything you need for structural analysisPython API — from pymol_rs import cmd and you're right at homePDB, mmCIF, BinaryCIF, SDF/MOL, MOL2, XYZ, GRO — read and write, automatic format detection, transparent gzip decompressionScenes, movies, ray tracing — all on the GPUKabsch superposition, CE alignment, RMSD, DSS, symmetry across all 230 space groupsOut of PyMOL's 798 original settings, some number of them actually work. Nobody knows exactly how many, but it's definitely in the hundreds. Plus we've added new settings that the original never had — like per-chain surface generation13 independent crates — if you're writing Rust, you can use just the selection parser, the file readers, or the full GUI. No monolith
Enrichment
- Theme
- gpu compute and acceleration tools
- Vertical
- —
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- rust reimplementation of pymol with modern rendering
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Rebuilding PyMOL in Rust with modern GPU rendering requires advanced expertise in computational biophysics and low-level graphics programming.
What it would actually take: The stack requires Rust with a graphics API like WebGPU/wgpu, custom shaders for molecular surface generation (SES/Connolly surfaces), and efficient spatial hashing algorithms for atomic structures. Achieving high performance requires domain knowledge in structural bioinformatics data formats (PDB/mmCIF) and GPU memory bandwidth optimization.
Discussion
5 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: PyMOL, VMD, RDKit
Concerns raised: Misuse of 'clean-room' terminology; code closely follows PyMOL's algorithms, Insufficient attribution for directly ported code (DSS, CE algorithms), PDB parser doesn't handle duplicate CONECT records for bond types, PDB parser uses integer for atom serial numbers, doesn't support base-36 or hybrid-36 variants, SDF parser has incorrect '$$$$' record detection logic
Feature requests: Add support for duplicate CONECT records and pdb_conect_nodup option, Support base-36 and hybrid-36 atom serial number variants for 100k+ atoms, Fix SDF record delimiter detection to handle embedded '$$$$' in data, Implement non-recursive SDF parsing to handle million-line files
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 228 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #217 of 229 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 115 days after the earliest competitor.
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Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.