JaiPrimer VS bevy

The first and most important step is having a language without statements and only expressions.

But, as Jai needs a `return` in functions, it already failed the trivial test.

https://github.com/BSVino/JaiPrimer/blob/master/JaiPrimer.md

Thanks, and yes, I didn't think about closures.

Talking about closures, I also don't know why Jai needs explicit capture lists. In C++ and Rust I understand the need for them, because you have various ways to pass them into the lambda, but Jai doesn't seem to care, at least in the examples at https://github.com/BSVino/JaiPrimer/blob/master/JaiPrimer.md....

Jonathan Blow & co will probably be busy enough trying to release Braid: Anniversary Edition this year (it will be Braid's 15th anniversary this August), and this will push the release of untitled-Sokoban-game until 2024 or later. Note also that the sokoban game is intended to promote the new programming language he is creating (https://github.com/BSVino/JaiPrimer/blob/master/JaiPrimer.md), so that might slow development / delay the release of the game beyond what would be expected for a normal videogame. (Ie, it's not just the sokoban game that needs to be ready for release, but also perhaps other features of the new language.)

There's quite a lot of information, just not very accessible.

https://www.twitch.tv/j_blow/videos?filter=archives&sort=tim... : this is jai's author livestreaming language development, most up-to-date

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmV5I2fxaiCKfxMBrNsU1... : a cureated subset of twitch videos, possibly outdated info

https://github.com/BSVino/JaiPrimer/blob/master/JaiPrimer.md : a summary of jai based on the above curated videos, possibly outdated

The Jai language is the main competitor to C++ I feel. The compile times are insanely short, which is what slows you down the most when actually developing a game in C++ Unreal.

There has been a lot of hype about the Jai programming language (for game development), but another language that has been heavily influenced by it and has a lot of similar syntax and concepts is Odin. Here is a blow by blow comparison, Jai vs Odin.

This reminded me of Jai, the language by Jon Blow. In the Primer here: https://github.com/BSVino/JaiPrimer/blob/master/JaiPrimer.md, the section on Data-oriented design is relevant. Note that the bottom of the OP article mentions explicitly the games industry as caring about this; relevant given Blow's background.

Look for "Data oriented design" or "Structs of arrays".

Here's a talk on the former by Mike Acton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc

On the latter, there's Jai, a new programming language for games (WIP, unpublished) by Jonathan Blow, who has been very public in documenting the process creating it, and which is centered around such concepts. There is some unofficial documentation of the ideas on SoA vs AoS and how the language can help switching between the two, e.g. here: https://pixeldroid.com/jailang/overview/Features/SOA/#/overv... and here: https://github.com/BSVino/JaiPrimer/blob/master/JaiPrimer.md...

Isn't that still the very thing that is done in various game engine entity component systems? Interestingly Jai language has out of box syntactic support for handling structs of arrays vs arrays of structs https://github.com/BSVino/JaiPrimer/blob/master/JaiPrimer.md#data-oriented-structures

Bevy. A very young engine where you need to write the game entirely in Rust—that was appealing. But fatal flaws overshadowed everything: no editor, the engine brutally enforces the ECS approach, and the game's architecture must literally bend to fit this paradigm. So, you won't migrate to another engine at all—you just throw away all the code and start from scratch.

Missing one of the best choices as long as "maturity" isn't on the top of your list: Bevy - https://bevyengine.org/

Game engine written in Rust, leveraging ECS in almost every place and way, with a really capable WASM export option. Wrestling ECS for the first time might take you some time, but in my experience helps you keep game code as clean and decoupled as game code could be.

I don't see WASM/WebGPU changing anything when it comes to gaming, as an industry, personally. 3d visualizations and interactive websites? Yeah definitely a nice improvement over WebGL 2, if years late.

WebGPU is pretty far behind what AAA games are using even as of 6 years ago. There's extra overhead and security in the WebGPU spec that AAA games do not want. Browsers do not lend themselves to downloading 300gb of assets.

Additionally, indie devs aren't using Steam for the technical capabilities. It's purely about marketshare. Video games are a highly saturated market. The users are all on Steam, getting their recommendations from Steam, and buying games in Steam sales. Hence all the indie developers publish to Steam. I don't see a web browser being appealing as a platform, because there's no way for developers to advertise to users.

That's also only indie games. AAA games use their own launchers, because they don't _need_ the discoverability from being on Steam. So they don't, and avoid the fees. If anything users _want_ the Steam monopoly, because they like the platform, and hate the walled garden launchers from AAA companies.

(I work on high end rendering features for the Bevy game engine https://bevyengine.org, and have extensive experience with WebGPU)

I was working through an example in the repo for the Bevy game engine recently and came across this code

That's possible. I did spend quite a bit of time tinkering with compiler flags, and followed the recommendations.

Some notes I found just now seems to agree with my results, though: https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/issues/3978#issuecomment-...

I cannot recommend immediate mode GUI programming based on the limitations I've experienced working with egui.

egui does not support putting two widgets in the center of the screen: https://github.com/emilk/egui/issues/3211

It's really easy to get started with immediate mode, it's really easy to bust out some UI, but the second you start trying to involve dynamically resized context and responsive layouts -- abandon all hope. The fact it has to calculate everything in a single pass makes these things hard/impossible.

... that said, I'm still using it for https://ant.care/ (https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants) because it's the best thing I've found. I'm crossing my fingers that Bevy's UI story (or Kayak https://github.com/StarArawn/kayak_ui) become significantly more fleshed out sooner rather than later. Bevy 0.13 should have lots more in this area though (https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/discussions/9538)

I've also been enjoying building My First Game™ in Bevy using ECS. The community around Bevy really shines, but Flecs (https://github.com/SanderMertens/flecs) is arguably a more mature, open-source ECS implementation. You don't get to write in Rust, though, which makes it less cool in my book :)

I'm not very proud of the code I've written because I've found writing a game to be much more confusing than building websites + backends, but, as the author notes, it certainly feels more elegant than OOP or globals given the context.

I'm building for WASM and Bevy's parallelism isn't supported in that context (yet? https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/issues/4078), so the performance wins are just so-so. Sharing a thread with UI rendering suuucks.

If anyone wants to browse some code or ask questions, feel free! https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants

These days, some game engines have done pretty well at making compute shaders easy to use (such as Bevy [1] -- disclaimer, I contribute to that engine). But telling the scientific/financial/etc. community that they need to run their code inside a game engine to get a decent experience is a hard sell. It's not a great situation compared to how easy it is on NVIDIA's stack.

[1]: https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/blob/main/examples/shader...

This is the API you need: https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/pull/9774