hecs VS egui

For Rust, I really like Bevy's, but it gets too much in the way. I'd probably use macroquad instead with something like hecs (I tried macroquad with Bevy ECS and didn't go well).

The question arises from seeing a plethora of projects using ECS: hecs , Bevy , specs, legion

My current design has struct Core that is basically "everything you need to save in a savefile", it has a hecs ECS (which needs a bit of boilerplate the hecs docs show you how to write to serialize it), and a bunch of simpler gamestate stuff like the discovered map positions, the current player etc. Everything is tree-like and serializes into a text file. Entity handles from hecs serve as "pseudo-pointers" that can represent cycle-like structures without running into endless cycles.

Out of the other Rust engines we've tried I think Macroquad was the most interesting option, and even though I've only made a few small projects in it worked extremely well and was what I'd expect from a game framework. While working in Bevy I felt like it was "writing fun Rust", but it wasn't really making a game. Macroquad on the other hand got immediately out of the way, and using it together with hecs was a painless experience where the whole time I felt like I was working on "the game" rather than "building systems that are invisible to the player".

The last crate worth mentioning is probably hecs for ECS, which we don't really use as heavily as some ECS fans would assume, but it made working around some problems between GDScript and Rust easier by storing things in ECS, passing around handles and querying ECS instead. Initially we did this with a global object and lots of state (which we still use for some things), but as the number of "things" grew it became easier to put it into ECS.

I use the awesome Vulkano for rendering and computation, and Rapier for simple physics. Contour is used for the initial shapes, but rapier forms the physics colliders from it. Hecs is used as well. And you might recognize Egui as gui :). I gotta say, I'm starting to be pretty happy with the rust ecosystem overall.

In the hecs documentation there is a section, Why Not ECS?. In it, the author states, "If your game will have few types of entities, consider a simpler architecture such as storing each type of entity in a separate plain Vec."

Usually, what I do is creating large, robust components in Rust. In my game, most of the logic lives inside the Factory node, which inside holds a full ECS (currently using https://github.com/Ralith/hecs) as well as other associated resources. This node takes care of holding the state and simulating all the machines in the factory and their interactions.

Generally, spatially-indexable data gets special treatment in games. (See Why not ECS for example, from the hecs ECS library.)

That impl basically says that Leftwalker is a System (or implements a System interface, to use a different parlance). Why exactly do Systems need lifetime is something better asked of the authors of the ECS library the tutorial uses. (personally I use hecs https://github.com/Ralith/hecs instead because I find it easier to use, no lifetime in sight :p)

Thanks for the feedback!

It is definitely fixable. Take a look at https://github.com/emilk/egui/issues/996 for some examples of how others have styled egui, or try out https://app.rerun.io/

Styling is done with `ctx.set_style`, but creating a nice style isn't very easy at the moment (basically you'll have to tweak constants in code, and then recompile). I'm working on making it easier as we speak though!

Nothing is wrong with that, it’s rather a workaround, ultimately I am trying to have one language only including the UI too (been playing with egui),so I don’t have to use JavaScript.

https://github.com/emilk/egui

FWIW, I opened an issue: https://github.com/emilk/egui/issues/4046

That's fair. I don't have experience with other immediate mode libraries. It's good to hear that it's not an intrinsic limitation

https://github.com/emilk/egui?tab=readme-ov-file#layout Here the author discusses the issue directly. They note that there are solutions to the issue, but that they all come with (in their opinion) significant drawbacks.

For my use case, if I have to do a lot of manual work to achieve what I consider behavior that should be handled by the framework, then I don't find that compelling and am inclined to use a retained mode implementation.

It totally depends on what IoT and what purpose, for example:

IIoT/PLC/industrial automation: most likely you will have to use vendors software, most if the time it’s crap, and a mix of several tech stacks like MSSQL/C#/C++

Sensors and such: depends on what are you building or using the sensors: the protocol mostly is MQTT, and if you would store it in a db postrrsql, elasticsearch, surreldb, influxdb among the most I used.

Robots/drones: on what I build, I use protobuf/grpc for performance and cross-language and direct linux socket io, and where needed websocket but mostly for any web interaction rather than the protocol itself. The tech stack for those, the embedded side is up to you or sometimes based on the sdk you are dealing with, the backend/frontend however, I used to use go/nodejs and for frontend svelte or a simple js library/framework, but recently I’m shifting and redoing everything in rust, embedded, backend and frontend (using something like egui https://github.com/emilk/egui).

When it comes to IoT, I try as much as possible to stay away from python unless you are scripting something else done in go/c++/rust, look at python as a glorified bash script, it’s useful for that or other data science work, but not in IoT.

Same goes with other tech you mentioned, it might suit one case but not another, for example, MQTT is good for sensor IoT type, but good luck controlling a drone with it, mongodb might be great to store a fleet of robots with its access credentials and such, but if you try to use it to store realtime data, it might not perform as expected, and so on.

AFAIK the Rust equivalent to C++'s Dear ImGui is egui.

The creator of Rerun (Emil Ernerfeldt) also created egui [1], an immediate GUI library for Rust. The library is similar to Dear ImGui but it is written in Rust and can be used for desktop and web apps (compiles to WASM and uses WebGL, demo [2]). Desktop apps can target OpenGL (does not display correct colors on macOS, does not work in VirtualBox on Windows) or WGPU (uses native APIs for each platform, works without any problems, but the binary is a big larger).

[1] https://github.com/emilk/egui

> [...] you can build UIs that are snappy and keyboard driven.

That's not an advantage that is exclusive to TUIs; after all, you're running your TUI inside a graphical application that emulates a terminal. (Unless you're rocking an actual VT102, in which case I bow down to you.)

In fact there's an entire class of applications that are extremely snappy and keyboard driven, by their very nature: games.

Some people have taken to writing GUI apps like you'd write a game, and the effects range from OK to fantastic. Check out Lagrange (https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/), AppManager (https://tildegit.org/solene/AppManager), Dear ImGUI (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui), egui (https://github.com/emilk/egui), and many others.

Honestly, frontend development especially with all these crowded frameworks and libraries always confused me so pardon my ignorance, which is why in a project I’m working on right now I’m trying not to use js, instead I’m using egui [1]

Zola is a static site generator and it’s crazy fast, using one binary only [2], also there’s Blades [3], same concept but supposedly faster, never tried it though.

[1] https://github.com/emilk/egui

[2] https://www.getzola.org

[3] https://getblades.org