bincode VS bevy

Ermm... actually I meant something like this: playground, but then I realized it's basically (de)serialization, and I just found that we already have a crate for that: bincode.

One, figure out the bincode format (documented here: https://github.com/bincode-org/bincode/blob/trunk/docs/spec.md) and write your own parser. Maybe a one-off that specifically only handles this one data structure would be fairly straightforward.

Step 1: The Deserialize type requests data from the Deserializer with one of the deserialize_type methods. This gives it an opportunity to provide certain metadata about the type: structs provide a list of fields, enums provide a list of variants, tuples provide a length, etc. Some data formats (notably bincode) require this metadata to drive deserializing, as the wire format is not self-describing. Crucially, the Deserialize type also provides a visitor that is capable of receiving the requested data from the Deserializer.

Alternatively, give Bincode a try.

Like separate instructions? I was thinking if a instruction have unknown length I make sure I have some kind of header field that tells the data length of the instruction so receiver knows when next instruction starts. And I was planning on using Bincode with serde to serialize and dezerialize like structs and stuff.

Isn't this essentially bincode?

This is similar in practice to using abi_stable, and end-users will still receive compiled files, but your plugins will be sandboxed and a single build will work on all platforms. The downside is that it's a bit more work because WebAssembly's support for passing complex data types between the host and the WebAssembly code is in the preliminary stages, so you need to do something like using Serde to encode your data into something like Bincode or MessagePack (or JSON and friends) to hand it off between the host and the plugin.

What kind of access do you need to the data ? You should be able to make a safe api to the Vec class by iterating on in in chunks, and using a closure to translate data between u8 and other representations. ( f32, u32 has the fomr_ne_bytes() / to_ne_bytes() methods ) You could make a helper function that takes a format description ( i.e. "fffuucc" , and calculates the size of the chunk, and generates a closure for reading accessing the data, of the layout is completely dynamic. This closure could use an enum to wrap the different primitive types. ) Or if the layouts are known at compile time , you could use procedural macros to generate code for serializaion / deserialization inot the the [u8] , though https://crates.io/crates/bincode may already do that for you )

Apparently there's a lot of discussion going on about that (3 of the 4 open tickets on the bincode implementation are about it), for example this one.

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