cgmath-rs VS rand

Take a look into math libraries, like glam, nalgebra, and cgmath. I've only used these through game engines, though, so I can't offer per-basis reviews/advice.

But I am writing a Vulkan-based game engine and I use https://crates.io/crates/cgmath extensively. It has vector classes, all the math functions I need, and it even supports a version of swizzling if you activate the feature. Maybe this crate can do what you need?

There's also a good crate which you can use to quickly create the required matrices called cgmath: https://crates.io/crates/cgmath

One great thing about Rust is that the library ecosystem is surprisingly mature, especially considering how young the language is (1.0 was released in 2015). C# also has good libraries, but from my experience it's kinda fiddly to use most open source libraries with Unity, at least without modifications. Rust's ecosystem has some excellent libraries that help with game development, such as noise for procedural generation and cgmath for linear algebra.

Making compatibility promises for distributions means they cannot take advantage of potential advancements in the field.

Defining an error type that is meaningful, portable, and compatible with no-std isn't straightforward. If the std lib's getrandom requires std, then just like that, rand and many other crates won't use it anyway. Using io::Result seems to me to face this challenge.

Some wasm targets can’t generate random numbers at all but in the case of the book because you are using wasm in a browser you can use JS to generate random numbers. I believe there’s a way to get the rand crate to use JS as the backend for generating rand but its a bit more convoluted than the easy one-liner that the book suggests.

rand

This uses rand and xcomplex to handle the mathematics, png to write image files, and dialoguer and indicatif for some pretty prompts and progress bars.

You can often achieve this without any unsafe by putting an assert!() on the length before the hot loop. For example, I got rid of some unsafe in rand that way.

This is a widely used method to map random integers to floating point numbers, but it has the disadvantage of wasting 1 bit of float mantissa precision.

On modern CPUs, its computational advantage over full-precision mapping methods, such as multiplication by a float, is not always clear [1].

[1] https://github.com/rust-random/rand/issues/416

In fact, there are a lot of crates in Rust where in other programming languages, it would be included in the standard library. Examples are regex, random number generators, additional iterator methods, macros for other collections, num traits, loggers, HTTP libraries, error handling, async runtimes, serialization and deserialization, date and time, and many more.