glow VS Elm

You can absolutely do WebGL. glow is a good place if you want to do the webgl stuff yourself. With wgpu you can as well, though it is mostly targeted to the upcoming WebGPU standard. I have seen many crates that are capable of gltf loading, but I haven't used any yet. Hence I can't reall recommend one. But gltf capability does not really have anything to do with rust. As long as you can read a file and translate it to your engines scene/entity structure, I don't see why it shouldn't be possible to load gltf files.

Most of it is written in Rust and compiles to Wasm with WebGL/OpenGL bindings via glow. The settings panel is written in Elm and the whole project is compiled with Nix. There’s also a very basic native desktop app. I haven’t seen many examples of a complete setup like this, so hopefully this can serve as a template for anyone trying out a similar stack.

If you want to target desktop, mobile and/or web: https://github.com/grovesNL/glow

A/B Street, which comprises a UI library, lots of data import pipelines, and traffic simulation. 100k LoC, the only unafe is to make system calls through glow

https://github.com/grovesNL/glow/blob/main/examples/howto/src/main.rs :)

https://github.com/grovesNL/glow is used by wgpu for its OpenGL ES / WebGL backend

By the way, nowadays many projects use glow instead of glutin because of.. I think it's because glow works on wasm, in the web (as webgl).

But what glow actually does is highlighted on lines 66 to 123. This section is filled with gl.some_function() calls, which is the same on every platform.

Elm [1] is based on a similar idea. Build your app from pure functions that return HTML tags.

[1] https://elm-lang.org/

You also wouldn't really be creating your own new programing language. You would be creating something that can run JavaScript by following JavaScript standards and syntax. You might be able to add some non-standard features of your own on top of those standards, or include your own standard library of helpers or utilities, but you can't completely make a new or alternative language and then load it in the browser (or at least not by reimplementing ECMAScript standards... you actually can make your own language that runs within any Javascript enviroment, if you provide an interpreter or compiler that transforms it into valid JS. Some people have done something like this, eg Elm: https://elm-lang.org/).

You should at least have a look at https://elm-lang.org/ it is a pure functional language like Haskell (although with fewer fancy syntax/type classes) but it has some lovely libraries for visualisation and even with plain elm (+ elm-ui) doing string transformations can be easily done.

I get it. However, the whole point of using Unions to narrow your types, ensure only a set of possible scenarios can occur, and only access data of a particular union when it’s safe to do so. That’s some of what pattern matching can provide, and 100% of what using switch statements in TypeScript with their Discriminated Unions can provide. Yes, it’s not 100% exhaustive, but TypeScript is not soundly typed, and even Elm which is still has the same issue TypeScript does: You’re running in JavaScript where anything is possible. So it’s good enough to build with and much better than what you had.

The beauty of a language like Elm (and other lambda-calculus / functional programming inspired languages) is that there's very little transformation involved in going from an idea to code. And that seems to have a big impact on getting things done.

I think the most fun and approachable way for beginners to build games with functional programming is with Elm [1].

See a few (small, demo) games built by the community in [2] .

Notice Elm has abandoned the FRP approach in favor of Model-View-Update [3].

[1] https://elm-lang.org/