entt VS specs

Compare entt vs specs and see what are their differences.

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entt specs
78 13
9,351 2,389
- 1.2%
9.8 7.2
6 days ago 3 months ago
C++ Rust
MIT License Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

entt

Posts with mentions or reviews of entt. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-09-02.
  • Focus: A simple and fast text editor written in Jai
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Sep 2023
    https://pastebin.com/VPypiitk This is a very small experiment i did to learn the metaprogramming features. its an ECS library using the same model as entt (https://github.com/skypjack/entt). In 200 lines or so it does the equivalent of a few thousand lines of template heavy Cpp while compiling instantly and generating good debug code.

    Some walkthrough:

    Line 8 declares a SparseSet type as a fairly typical template. its just a struct with arrays of type T inside. Next lines implement getters/setters for this data structure

    Line 46 Base_Registry things get interesting. This is a struct that holds a bunch of SparseSet of different types, and providers getters/setters for them by type. It uses code generation to do this. The initial #insert at the start of the class injects codegen that creates structure members from the type list the struct gets on its declaration. Note also how type-lists are a native structure in the lang, no need for variadics.

    Line 99 i decide to do variadic style tail templates anyway for fun. I implement a function that takes a typelist and returns the tail, and the struct is created through recursion as one would do in cpp. Getters and setters for the View struct are also implemented through recursion

    Line 143 has the for expansion. This is how you overload the for loop functionality to create custom iterators.

    The rest of the code is just some basic test code that runs the thing.

  • Introducing Ecsact
    8 projects | dev.to | 24 Jun 2023
    Since we wanted a common game simulation that would be on both the server and the client we looked into a few libraries that would fit our ECS needs. It was decided we were going to write this common part of our game in C++, but rust was considered. C++ was a familiar language for us so naturally EnTT and flecs came up right away. I had used EnTT before, writing some small demo projects, so our choice was made based on familiarity. In order to integrate with Unity we created a small C interface to communicate between our simulation code and Unity’s C#. Here’s close to what it looked like. I removed some parts for brevity sake.
  • Sharing Saturday #472
    7 projects | /r/roguelikedev | 23 Jun 2023
    Are you sure you don't want to use a C++ package manager? Libtcod is on Vcpkg and with that setup you could add the fmt library or EnTT. fmt fixes C++'s string handling and EnTT fixes everything wrong with the entities of the previous tutorials.
  • Where can I find the juiciest, most complex and modern c++ code?
    2 projects | /r/cpp_questions | 9 Jun 2023
  • What are the limits of blueprints?
    4 projects | /r/unrealengine | 25 May 2023
    There's also a performance question. While we can now use Blueprint nativization to convert Blueprints to C++ the result will be a fairly naive version, fast enough for most purposes but not if you're trying to push every bit of performance. This is where you're looking at making sure you're hitting things such as using the CPU cache as well as possible for an ECS system (Look at ENTT or Flecs if you want to see what they're about and why you'd want one), or a system needing to process massive amounts of data quickly such as the Voxel Plugin.
  • any resources for expanding on ECS?
    4 projects | /r/gamedev | 22 Apr 2023
    For a modern engine you’re probably best looking at Unity’s DOTS. You may also want to check out some of the different open source ECS libraries such as flecs and EnTT are two popular ones for C++, but there’s lots of them. Largely you’ll see lots of different approaches taken, all with their own pros and cons. Not all of them will be performant (some focus more on the design benefits) while others will be optimised for certain use cases. What you should prioritise will depend on your specific needs.
  • DynaMix 2.0.0 Released
    8 projects | /r/cpp | 13 Apr 2023
    You can think of DynaMix as combining one of these libraries with an ECS like entt(https://github.com/skypjack/entt)
  • Flecs – A fast entity component system for C and C++
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Apr 2023
    https://github.com/skypjack/entt is a fantastic alternative; also, one of the most beautiful codebases/elegant designs I 've come across.
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Apr 2023
  • Please roast my ECS implementation
    2 projects | /r/gamedev | 27 Feb 2023
    As a way to force myself to learn more about game engines I've created asimov-ts. While doing it, I tried to refrain from looking at other ECS implementations as much as possible and use only more theoretical sources. As a result, I think it's a bit different from other stuff I've seen like EnTT and bevy_ecs.

specs

Posts with mentions or reviews of specs. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-07-02.
  • Why ECS pattern is popular in Rust?
    4 projects | /r/rust | 2 Jul 2023
    The question arises from seeing a plethora of projects using ECS: hecs , Bevy , specs, legion
  • Ecs fundamentally at odds with borrow checker.
    2 projects | /r/rust_gamedev | 10 Sep 2022
    specs
  • Veloren is releasing 0.13!
    4 projects | /r/rust | 23 Jul 2022
    The official 3d rendering client uses a custom engine called Voxygen. They use Specs for logic.
  • How are rust devs doing?
    10 projects | /r/GraphicsProgramming | 17 Jul 2022
    Rust has a delightful ECS library, specs, that I absolutely love. It has safe multi-threaded execution built right in, which is fantastic for the pretty parallelizable work I was doing. Concurrency in C++ is nasty business on the best of days, and I've run into so many nasty bugs with the custom system I've had to build out to fit the web's weird threading model.
  • Programming a Rogue-Like with Rust
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Jul 2022
    Man, this Specs [0] library is so strange to me, coming from a Unity background. Is there some sort of comparison as to why one way is better than the other?

    [0] https://specs.amethyst.rs/

  • Bellclone: a simple 2D game about jumping
    2 projects | /r/rust | 17 Sep 2021
    Hi everyone - I just picked up one of my long-unfinished side project built with Rust and would like to show it to you here. It's a clone of the famous(?) Winterbells game. It's written entirely in Rust and uses OpenGL and an entity-component-system architecture ([the `specs` crate](https://crates.io/crates/specs)) (still learning), no game engine.
  • There are a *lot* of actor framework projects on Cargo.
    17 projects | /r/rust | 1 May 2021
    Wait did the person at your company write specs or something else because they weren't pleased with it? I don't know much about amethyst and vaguely know about entity component systems but I watched a talk on someone making a game with amethyst and was pretty impressed -- it looked thoroughly approachable and I do not doubt the performance is there (since the whole reason you do ECS is performance).
  • Actor model (with time?)
    3 projects | /r/rust | 11 Mar 2021
    You could also look at Entity Component Systems. Something like specs.
  • Why isn't Godot an ECS-based game engine?
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Feb 2021
    If you are making a game, instead of a game engine, you can have your cake and eat it too -

    https://godot-rust.github.io/

    Allows you to pair Rust with Godot comfortably via gdnative.

    Then use one of the good ECS systems in Rust like -

    https://github.com/amethyst/specs

    or (archetype style ECS)

    https://github.com/amethyst/legion

    To get spun up on ECS in Rust I suggest -

    http://bfnightly.bracketproductions.com/rustbook/chapter_0.h...

    This won't get you a godot project but will get you a basic concepted game you can then port into godot-rust.

  • μECS - a tiny and fast ECS library
    4 projects | /r/javascript | 20 Feb 2021
    Fair enough on leaving parts up to other code instead of the library. I started my ECS with the idea of optimized storage (eg hash maps for sparse components) and indexing (which is why formal Not helps a lot, but indeed Maybe is only sugar for less code). I really liked this Rust ECS which also does parallelization, which makes it important for the ECS to also know which order the systems execute in, and their dependencies on each other (something I started doing but never finished): https://github.com/amethyst/specs

What are some alternatives?

When comparing entt and specs you can also consider the following projects:

flecs - A fast entity component system (ECS) for C & C++

bevy - A refreshingly simple data-driven game engine built in Rust

Hazel - Hazel Engine

raylib - A simple and easy-to-use library to enjoy videogames programming

flecs-lua - Lua script host for flecs

Roguelike-Tutorial-2021 - Roguelike tutorial written hard with GDscript

UnrealCLR - Unreal Engine .NET 6 integration

Taskflow - A General-purpose Parallel and Heterogeneous Task Programming System

bgfx - Cross-platform, graphics API agnostic, "Bring Your Own Engine/Framework" style rendering library.

Amethyst - Data-oriented and data-driven game engine written in Rust

Svelto.ECS - Svelto ECS C# Entity Component System

imgui - Dear ImGui: Bloat-free Graphical User interface for C++ with minimal dependencies