Playbot NG is a drop-in replacement for the retired IRC bot named playbot. There's an instance of Playbot NG named eval running on Moznet.

Interaction with playbot is done either via commands or by talking directly to it.

Playbot will evaluate Rust code that you give to it via private message or by prefixing a message with its nickname (followed by a colon), e.g. eval: 42 + 777. By default the code is wrapped in a template that prints the result of the expression via its Debug impl. This behaviour can be changed (see --bare/--mini below)

There a few flags that can modify the behaviour of the evaluation. You can select the release channel using --stable (default), --beta, or --nightly. You can pick the build profile using --debug (default), or --release. To make playbot evaluate your code as it is, pass --bare or --mini. To make playbot print the Rust version, pass --version (can be combined with the above channel flags; code is ignored).

For convenience, inner attributes at the beginning of code are treated as crate attributes, e.g. eval: --nightly #![feature(nll)] …. This rule does not apply when --bare or --mini is given.

To display a link to this help you can pass help, h, -h, -help, --help, or --h.

Commands are prefixed by ? and can have parameters, e.g. ?crate itertools. They can also be used inline by enclosing them into braces, e.g. You can use {?crate itertools} for that.

Display information about <crate> from crates.io

Example: ?crate itertools

Display a link to this help

Example: ?help