alire-index VS ASFML

Submitted libtcl and libtk externals to Alire’s 1.2.1 index - all problems fixed, I hope.

I do not know the exact rationale of the Alire devs, but Ada already uses (since 83) the word "package" to indicate a module or namespace, so calling dependencies a "crate" seems to avoid confusion with an Ada "package".

The crates of the community index [1] are somewhat vetted because they are added to the index using a PR on GitHub. You're not required to use these external crates though, you can create your own monorepo if you want.

My personal experience has been that a package manager (for any language) makes it much easier to download and build some project.

[1] https://github.com/alire-project/alire-index

Yes you can specify dependency on external libraries that will be provided by the distribution (or msys2 on WIndows). We already have a few of those in the index, for instance you can take a look at SDL2: https://github.com/alire-project/alire-index/blob/stable-1.0/index/li/libsdl2/libsdl2-external.toml

Unfortunately, Ada is not used for professional game development, but it will probably help a single developer to develop a bug-free game more than C++. For a 2D game, one good option as toolkit is the binding to SFML.

Have you followed the instructions in ASFML to make it work? The easiest way is to import the library using Alire.

I resurrected an abandoned binding to SFML and updated it to version 2.5. I finally made so many changes to the Ada API, that I can consider it my own work, and have the joy to see it used by other people.

A new bugfix release of ASFML: https://github.com/mgrojo/ASFML/releases/tag/v2.5.2

Since we're talking about a game, ASFML might be a good option.

I maintain a binding to SFML: https://github.com/mgrojo/ASFML

The Ada binding to the Simple and Fast Multimedia Library has released a new version compatible with SFML v2.5.