docs.rs VS bevy

Working in combination with CodeWhisperer in your IDE, you can send whole code sections to Amazon Q and ask for an explanation of what the selected code does. To show how this works, we open up the file.rs file cloned from this GitHub repository. This is part of an open source project to host documentation of crates for the Rust Programming Language, which is a language we are not familiar with.

Looks like a great initiative – I wish there was a reliable TS/JS equivalent of https://docs.rs (even considering rustdoc's deficiencies[1]).

I went through this exercise recently and so far my experience with trying to produce documentation from a somewhat convoluted TS codebase[2] has been disappointing. I would claim it's a consequence of the library's public (user-facing) API substantially differing from how the actual implementation is structured.

Typedoc produces bad results for that codebase so sphinx-js, which I wanted to use, doesn't have much to work with. I ultimately documented things by hand, for now, the way the API is meant to be used by the user.

Compare:

https://ts-results-es.readthedocs.io/en/latest/reference/api...

vs

https://tsdocs.dev/docs/ts-results-es/4.1.0-alpha.1/index.ht...

Rust Search Extension adds a section on docs.rs menubar which lists the features of a crate in a nice and easy to access format.

📝 Note: At the time of writing this post, I couldn't really locate the init function docs.rs documentation. It didn't seem easily accessible through any of the current HAL implementation documentation. Nevertheless, I reached the signature of the function through the source here.

Rust Crates are a Game-Changer 🎮:The ease of releasing a crate with `cargo publish` and the convenience of rolling out new versions amazed me. The auto-generated docs on Docs.rs. is an amazing tool, especially with docstring formatting. Doc tests serve as a two-fold tool for documenting the code and ensuring it's up-to-date.

I've found I manually type out certain subsets of URLs where possible[0], maybe that's subconsciously associated with my impression that Google Search results have gotten worse and worse over the years.

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ and https://docs.rs/ come to mind.

docs.rs also downloads you crate automatically to generate docs and I would guess lib.rs does something similar

There are also a few key sites you'll want to keep in your back pocket at all times: - The Standard Library Documentation has complete documentation for every std library function in Rust - crates.io is a repository for all third-party packages, and docs.rs has human-readable documentation for the overwhelming majority of them - The Rust Cookbook has some code examples for common tasks you may need to perform - Make sure you are using clippy, which is available through Rustup and can be run with cargo clippy as a replacement to cargo check, it adds additional lints for your Rust code and is very helpful for teaching many of the best practices

OTOH, source-code-generated-docs normalize how code docs are, like the rust docs.rs paradigm, so it sort of forces or encourages package creators/maintainers to write docs.

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

Most of Nanite (at least, everything but the LOD system, I haven't tried that part, and the compute rasterizer due to lack of storage image atomics because Metal lacks them...) is implementable in WebGPU actually.

I have a PR that does a lot of the same things (meshlets, visbuffer, material depth, two pass occlusion culling) open for Bevy https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/pull/10164 that I've been working on, which uses WebGPU.

WebGPU is actually a pretty good API imo. It's missing some advanced features like raytracing, mesh shaders, and subgroup operations (coming soon!), but it can still do a lot.

The much bigger missing feature is "bindless" support (non-uniform arrays of bound resources). BindGroup overhead (and ergonomics) is a significant downside.