box2d-wasm VS vite

https://github.com/Birch-san/box2d-wasm.) Godot uses box2d, too, so that would be convenient, if I switch to godot, but only if it is worth the performance improvement, which it currently does not seem to be. Maybe next year.

Following the article, you build a simple 2D physic simulation (only for balls). Did by chance anyone expand on that to include boxes, or know of a different approach to build a physic engine in WebGPU?

I experiemented a bit with it and imolemented raycasting, but it is really not trivial getting the data in and out. (Limiting it to boxes and circles would satisfy my use case and seems doable, but getting polygons would be very hard, as then you have a dynamic size of their edges to account for and that gives me headache)

3D physic engine on the GPU would be the obvious dream goal to get maximum performance, but that is really not an easy thing to do.

Right now I am using a Box2D for wasm and it has good performance, but it could be better.

https://github.com/Birch-san/box2d-wasm

The main problem with all this is the overhead of getting data into the gpu and back. Once it is on the gpu it is amazingly fast. But the back and forth can really make your framerates drop - so to make it worth it, most of the simulation data has to remain on the gpu and you only put small chanks of data that have changed in and out. And ideally render it all on the gpu in the next step.

(The performance bottleneck of this simulation is exactly that, it gets simulated on the gpu, then retrieved and drawn with the normal canvasAPI which is slow)

box2dwasm - an old, still maintained C++ library compiled to WASM. The documentation is lacking and developer experience seems poor.

network inspector says 2.1MB. but that's dominated by a 1.3MB image.

the main assets of the library are:

- Box2D.simd.js (422kB)

- Box2D.simd.wasm (266 kB)

a minimal demo that uses the library can be created in just a few kB:

https://github.com/Birch-san/box2d-wasm/tree/master/demo/mod...

A couple weeks ago I ported liquidfun to TypeScript + WebAssembly: https://github.com/Birch-san/box2d-wasm/releases/tag/v4.0.0-liquidfun.0

Vite focuses on providing an extremely fast development server and workflow speed in web development. It uses its own ES module imports during development, speeding up the startup time.

Vite and Next.js are both top 5 modern development framework right now. They are both great depending on your use case so we’ll discuss 4 areas: Architecture, main features, developer experience and production readiness. After learning about these we’ll have a better idea of which one is best for your project.

import { defineConfig } from 'vite' import react from '@vitejs/plugin-react-swc' import path from 'path' // https://vitejs.dev/config/ export default defineConfig({ plugins: [react()], server: { port: 3000 }, css: { devSourcemap: true }, resolve: { alias: { '~': path.resolve(__dirname, './src') } } })

I am currently utilizing Vite:

Homepage: https://vitejs.dev/

Without any adding any dependencies you can connect react props to raw css at runtime with nothing but css variables (aka "custom properties"). If you add CSS modules on top you don't have to worry about affecting the global scope so components created in this way can be truly modular and transferrable. I use this with vite.

Little confused as to why it has vite in it‘s name, it seems unrelated to https://vitejs.dev/

it says in their docs that they recommend Vite https://vitejs.dev/

it goes like this.

1. you create a repo folder, you cd into it.

2. you create a client template using vite which can be plain typescript, or uses frameworks such as react or vue, at https://vitejs.dev/guide/

3. you cd in that client directory, you npm install, then you npm run dev, it should show you that it works at localhost:5173

4. you follow the instructions on your url, you do npm install @web3modal/wagmi @wagmi/core @wagmi/connectors viem

5. you follow the further instructions.

> It seems like this is for npm or yarn to pull from a remote repository maintained by @wagmi for instance. But then what?

you install the wagmi modules, then you import them in your js code, those code can run upon being loaded or upon user actions such as button clicks

> Do I just symlink to the node_modules directory somehow? Use browserify? Or these days I'd use webpack or whatever the cool kids are using these days?

no need for those. browserify is old school way of transpiling commonjs modules into browser-compatible modules. webpack is similar. vite replaces both webpack and browserify. vite also uses esbuild and swc under the hood which replaces babel.

> I totally get how node package management works ... for NODE. But all these client-side JS projects these days have docs that are clearly for the client-side but the ES2015 module examples they show seem to leave out all instructions for how to actually get the files there, as if it's obvious.

pretty much similar actually. except on client-side, you have src and dist folders. when you run "npm run build" vite will compile the src dir into dist dir. the outputs are the static files that you can serve with any http server such as npx serve, or caddy, or anything really.

> What gives? And finally, what exactly does "browserify" do these days, since I think Node supports both ES modules and and CJS modules? I also see sometimes UMD universal modules

vite supports both ecmascript modules and commonjs modules. but these days you'll just want to stick with ecmascript which makes your code consistently use import and export syntax, and you get the extra benefit of it working well with your vscode intellisense.

> In short, I'm a bit confused how to use package management properly with browsers in 2024: https://modern-web.dev/guides/going-buildless/es-modules/

if people want plain js there is unpkg.com and esm.sh way, but the vite route is the best for you as it's recommended and tested by the providers of your modules.

> And finally, if you answer this, can you spare a word about typescript? Do we still need to use Babel and Webpack together to transpile it to JS, and minify and tree-shake, or what?

I recommend typescript, as it gives you better type-safety and better intellisense, but it really depends. If you're new to it, it can slow you down at first. But as your project grows you'll eventually see the value of it. In vite there are options to scaffold your project in pure js or ts.

First you have to know that all those react projects are created using Vite, and for each of them, you need change the vite.config.ts file by adding the following configuration:

CSSHooks works with React, Prereact, Solid.js, and Qwik, and we’re going to use Vite with the React configuration. First, let's create a project called css-hooks and install Vite: