cosmic VS mach

What if you could develop native applications in JavaScript or WASM, with a runtime that is not Electron? Cosmic is one answer to that, and a project to keep an eye on for sure:

Example can be found at https://github.com/fubark/cosmic/blob/master/ui/examples/text_demo.zig

Definitely want to target Vulkan/Metal/DirectX. Also would like to support WebGPU when it's ready. The drawing is conveniently abstracted away in https://github.com/fubark/cosmic/blob/master/graphics/src/graphics.zig

More details about the UI engine and how to use it in your own zig projects can be found here: https://github.com/fubark/cosmic/tree/master/ui

I don't know if you're into game development at all, but we're always looking for contributors to Mach :) I should really do a "job board" type thing so it's more clear how folks could contribute, but here are some ideas:

I want to try using ZGL and mach-glfw and I just can't get it to work.

Still experimental - I haven't had a chance to do a proper write-up, publish this as a standalone repository, or provide examples.. but we have mach/sysjs which is a library that enables calling JS from Zig.

Mach

[0] https://github.com/hexops/mach/issues/230

Was watching your update in the Khronos Group meetup a few days ago, very impressive work. I'm excited for what this will mean for the web overall, it might finally reach that tipping point where more than .io games become standard to play in the web. That's huge, and will drive demand for more powerful web APIs too.

WebGPU in general is very nice. We're building a game engine[0] that uses Zig to build Dawn (Google Chrome WebGPU implementation) from source for running on desktop / Steamdeck, and working on browser support via WASM now.

The future is bright here.

[0] https://machengine.org

Although it's not ready for prime time yet, and not advised to test with it yet as many bugs are already known, we're already seeing it can compile parts of some major projects with a bit of finangling.

I do my best to get 40+ solid hours a week into a life-long passion project: the Mach game engine.

* Linux (arm): 15 MiB

That's full cross compilation of WebGPU GUI applications to all desktop platforms in under ~217 MiB for most platforms.

[0] https://machengine.org

Yeah, I'm always on the look for new graphics libraries, but there are far less good libraries out there than one may think. I tried sokol recently but it has a lot of problems that I don't find in raylib. raylib has a lot of disagreeable parts for me too, but at least it's extremely simple and very well maintained and you can get things done really quickly. The ultimate goal of course would be to go with something like https://github.com/hexops/mach that is actually written in Zig, but until that stuff evolves we will pretty much have to rely on external stuff (unless you specifically want to do very low-level graphics development in which case you could just interact with the APIs directly, of course).