Cargo VS bevy

Dependency Management in Other Languages: We've discussed Python and Node.js in this article, but dependency management is a universal concept in programming. Exploring how you handle dependencies in other languages like Java, C#, or Rust could be beneficial. (I think Rust's cargo is an excellent example of a package manager.)

Nice hack! Would it have been possible back then to use cargo to pull in some dependencies?

The clean solution of cargo script is here: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/12207

Yes, I am sure this is going to be a part of Rust 1.77.0 and it will release on 21st March. I say that because of the tag in the PR (https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/pull/13257#event-11505613...).

I'm no expert on Rust compiler development, but my understanding is that all code that is merged into master is available on nightly. If they're not behind a feature flag (this one isn't), they'll be available in a full release within 12 weeks of being merged. Larger features that need a lot more testing remain behind feature flags. Once they are merged into master, they remain on nightly until they're sufficiently tested. The multi-threaded frontend (https://blog.rust-lang.org/2023/11/09/parallel-rustc.html) is an example of such a feature. It'll remain nightly only for several months.

Again, I'm not an expert. This is based on what I've observed of Rust development.

The author provides very surface-level criticism of two Rust tools, but they don't look into why those choices were made.

With about five minutes of my time, I found out:

wrap_comments was introduced in 2019 [0]. There are bugs in the implementation (it breaks Markdown tables), so the option hasn't been marked as stable. Progress on the issue has been spotty.

--no-merge-sources is not trivial to re-implement [1]. The author has already explained why the flag no longer works -- Cargo integrated the command, but not all of the flags. This commit [2] explains why this functionality was removed in the first place.

Rust is open source, so the author of this blog post could improve the state of the software they care about by championing these issues. The --no-merge-sources error message even encourages you to open an issue, presumably so that the authors of Cargo can gauge the importance of certain flags/features.

You could even do something much simpler, like adding a comment to the related issues mentioning that you ran into these rough edges and that it made your life a little worse, or with a workaround that you found.

Alternatively, you can continue to write about how much free software sucks.

[0]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rustfmt/issues/3347

[1]: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/pull/10344

[2]: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/commit/3842d8e6f20067f716...

You try to use it as a part of multi-language project, with an external build tool to tie it all together, and you discover that --out-dir flag is still not stabilized over some future compatibility concerns.

To create a new application we'll use cargo (a build tool and also a package manager for Rust. It is used for scaffolding new library/binary projects). So in your projects folder, you can run this command in your terminal:

> ...but at the end of the day Cargo is the reason that Rust is popular.

FWIW, maybe that's true for you, but there are numerous other advantages to the language for which many people choose to use Rust--some even "despite" Cargo: you see Google having had to put in way way WAY too much work to get Bazel working for Rust :/--that it honestly feels a bit like belittling an extremely important language to make this claim so flippantly.

> You can set a default build target for a Cargo project with two lines of configuration, no nightly features necessary...

This doesn't work as, as soon as you start setting target-specific options, it infects the host build, as they incorrectly modelled the problem as some kind of map from targets to flags. If you don't believe me, on your Linux computer, try cross-compile something complicated that will runs on a "least common denominator" Linux distribution, such as CentOS 7.

> Can you clarify what this is referring to?

Sure. I've Googled rust cargo target host bugs for you (which, FWIW, finds a number of bugs I've filed or have talked about, but it isn't as if I have a list anywhere). Note that one of these bugs is "closed", but I still provide them for context as a patch might have been merged but (as you'll find out if you read through all of these) it isn't stable.

https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/8147

https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/3349

https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/pull/9322

https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/9453

https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/pull/9753

The result of this work being left incomplete is that increasingly large numbers of "serious" projects--things I'd expect people in packaging land to have heard of, such as BuildRoot--are being forced to set the ridiculous environment variable __CARGO_TEST_CHANNEL_OVERRIDE_DO_NOT_USE_THIS="nightly" in order to get access to a flag that makes Cargo sort of work.

(And yet, I often see people surprised at how long it is taking for various of the more important clients to fully get into using Rust, as the safety issues are so severe from continuing to use C/C++: as you made the contention that you believe the reason why people use Rust is Cargo, I will say the opposite: the reason why we don't see more Rust is also Cargo.)

What has worked for me so far:

https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/

(do the exercises!)

plus a little bit of:

https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/

and

https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/index.html

(There's no need to remember the last URL -- just google "rust xxx" and you will get the right page.)

I'm looking forward to reading this:

https://nnethercote.github.io/perf-book/introduction.html

Sprinkle some blog posts on top:

https://xxchan.me/cs/2023/02/17/optimize-rust-comptime-en.ht...

https://matklad.github.io/2021/05/31/how-to-test.html

https://matklad.github.io/2021/08/22/large-rust-workspaces.h...

https://fasterthanli.me/articles/a-half-hour-to-learn-rust

https://fasterthanli.me/articles/working-with-strings-in-rus...

... and the rest is just a matter of applying enough sweat :)

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