libc VS stb

> I absolutely don't see how this is a problem with semver,

Strange to not see it. Semver promises to solve dependency hell. In the example everyone correctly followed the sevmver and the app is broken by a dependency hell issue.

> it is not the responsibility of semver to tell a language how packages should be isolated and loaded. That is a problem of a) the language and b) dependency resolution in the package manager.

So semver only works for "good" languages?

> Bundler, by design, does not allow the above, instead having a flat, consistent vision of dependencies.

Ok, so what happens with the app when packages managed by Bundler get fragmented by depending on an incompatible version of sub-dependency (commons-logging 1.1.1 vs 2.0.1 as in the example)?

Also note, even for languages and tooling supporting multiple library versions loaded side by side, there are scenarios where things break.

For example, the "libc apocalypse" situation in Rust https://github.com/rust-lang/libc/issues/547

Here after the "libc" module released a major version, the definition for the `void` C type in two versions of the lib are considered by the compiler as two different types, resulting in breakages everywhere around the library ecosystem.

There are also scenarios for dynamic languages / runtime errors.

> None of this is the responsibility of semver. In fact, semver would help the language provide tooling to detect that kind of "hey this instance is from foo-1.0 but you're trying to consume it in foo-2.0".

And what's next after it detected the dependency hell? It's too late and the person suffering is not in the position to fix it. You have to upgrade to "authentication 1.1.2" for security compliance, because the version 1.1.1 has known vulnerabilities. But that breaks the application, because the maintainer of the lower level dependency "commons-logging" follows semantic versioning.

The promise was to prevent dependency hell, not to detect it.

Quoting the ticket and reiterating the point of my first comment above:

Once again, the point of this ticket is to:

    Remove the false promise that SemVer solves dependency hell by simply increasing major version.

Even if coexistence of multiple library versions is supported, there are scenarios where things break.

For example, the "libc apocalypse" situation in Rust https://github.com/rust-lang/libc/issues/547

Here after the "libc" module released a major version, the definition for the `void` C type in two versions of the lib are considered by the compiler as two different types, resulting in breakages everywhere around the library ecosystem.

There are also scenarios for dynamic languages / runtime errors in statically typed languages.

My main problem with the current SemVer spec, is that it does not mention multiple lib versions problem, and promises the dependency hell issues can be solved simply by updating major version number. Thus encouraging to break backward compatibility freely.

Also note, it's not the case that SemVer is intended only for languages supporting multiple library versions. The SemVer is a product of Ruby community, and Ruby has a global namespace for classes and unable to have several versions of a lib simultaneously.

In 2000s they were breaking compatibility left and right, neglecting elementary compatibility practices. If you were working on an application, practically every time when you update dependencies, something would break.

So (in 2011 ?) they came out with this "manifesto" (Why such a big name? This scheme of versioning was well established in linkers and sonames of all Unix-like systems for decades - it goes back to at least 1987 paper "Shared Libraries in SunOS").

It's a good thing SemVer acknowledges finally that compatibility is a serious matter. Only that it's better to discourage compatibility breakages. An in cases when it's really needed (I agree such cases exists), there are things to take care of in addition to simply increase major version num.

The libc crate exposes system C APIs in Rust code, and is used by the compiler and standard library. It also does not contain any C code. See for yourself.

Ok, what if we are sure that our C code would use a given version of malloc/free only to allocate memory (are we ever sure about anything like that is out of the scope of the article)? Well, in this case we are brave enough to use libc crate in our rust code:

Port libc. I recommend using bindgen for this.

While looking at the libc crate and its build script, I don’t quite understand when or how the crate’s libc definitions link to the build target’s actual libc.

For what it's worth, there's been discussion of this not only for glibc on Linux but also for BSDs which take many more liberties with API and ABI compatibility to keep their technical debt low. I can't summarise the years of discussion here but I encourage anyone interested to read through https://github.com/rust-lang/libc/issues/570

In answer to what appears to be a misunderstanding about Rust:

> Its foreign function interface seems particularly poorly implemented. The official Rust documentation suggests the use of the external third-party libc library (called a 'crate' in Rust parlance) to provide the type definitions necessary to interface with C programs. As of the time of writing, this crate has had 95 releases. Contrast this with Ada’s Interfaces.C package, which was added the language in Ada 95 and hasn’t needed to change in any fundamental way since.

Rust's libc crate isn't third-party, it's first-party, developed by the Rust project itself: https://github.com/rust-lang/libc/ . It's also not just for "type definitions necessary to interface with C programs"; here's the first heading and first paragraph of its README:

"libc - Raw FFI bindings to platforms' system libraries"

libc provides all of the definitions necessary to easily interoperate with C code (or "C-like" code) on each of the platforms that Rust supports. This includes type definitions (e.g. c_int), constants (e.g. EINVAL) as well as function headers (e.g. malloc).

The fact that this library contains low-level type definitions for every platform that Rust supports explains why it's had more than one release: new platforms get added, platforms add new interfaces, and platforms change the definitions of existing interfaces.

> It lacks basic features necessary for the task, like bitfields, and data structure packing.

The latter is achieved via the built-in `repr(packed)` attribute (https://doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/other-reprs.html#reprpacke...) and the former is provided by the bitflags crate: https://crates.io/crates/bitflags (while unlike libc this does not live under the rust-lang org on Github, it does live under its own org which appears to be populated exclusively by Rust project team members).

It came up in this issue in the libc crate. The initializer for a static has to be const, which is why the issue submitter wanted it. He couldn't use lazy_static or once_cell, common patterns in Rust, since he was later using the static in a unix signal handler (which must be async signal safe).

Have you considered not using an engine at all, in favor of libraries? There are many amazing libraries I've used for game development - all in C/C++ - that you can piece together:

* General: [stb](https://github.com/nothings/stb)

Great to see more accessible references on font internals. I have dabbled on this a bit last year and managed to have a parser and render the points of a glyph's contour (I stopped before Bezier and shape filling stuff). I still have not considered hinting, so it's nice that it's covered. What helped me was an article from the Handmade Network [1] and the source of stb_truetype [2] (also used in Dear ImGUI).

[1] https://handmade.network/forums/articles/t/7330-implementing....

[2] https://github.com/nothings/stb/blob/master/stb_truetype.h

So I read through the materials on mesh shaders and work graphs and looked at sample code. These won't really work (see below). As I implied previously, it's best to research/discuss these sort of matters with professional graphics programmers who have experience actually using the technologies under consideration.

So for the sake of future web searchers who discover this thread: there are only two proven ways to efficiently draw thousands of unique textures of different sizes with a single draw call that are actually used by experienced graphics programmers in production code as of 2023.

Proven method #1: Pack these thousands of textures into a texture atlas.

Proven method #2: Use bindless resources, which is still fairly bleeding edge, and will require fallback to atlases if targeting the PC instead of only high end console (Xbox Series S|X...).

Mesh shaders by themselves won't work: These have similar texture access limitations to the old geometry/tessellation stage they improve upon. A limited, fixed number of textures still must be bound before each draw call (say, 16 or 32 textures, not 1000s), unless bindless resources are used. So mesh shaders must be used with an atlas or with bindless resources.

Work graphs by themselves won't work: This feature is bleeding edge shader model 6.8 whereas bindless resources are SM 6.6. (Xbox Series X|S might top out at SM 6.7, I can't find an authoritative answer.) It looks like work graphs might only work well on nVidia GPUs and won't work well on Intel GPUs anytime soon (but, again, I'm not knowledgeable enough to say this authoritatively). Furthermore, this feature may have a hard dependency on using bindless to begin with. That is, I can't tell if one is allowed to execute a work graph that binds and unbinds individual texture resources. And if one could do such a thing, it would certainly be slower than using bindless. The cost of bindless is paid "up front" when the textures are uploaded.

Some programmers use Texture2DArray/GL_TEXTURE_2D_ARRAY as an alternative to atlases but two limitations are (1) the max array length (e.g. GL_MAX_ARRAY_TEXTURE_LAYERS) might only be 256 (e.g. for OpenGL 3.0), (2) all textures must be the same size.

Finally, for the sake of any web searcher who lands on this thread in the years to come, to pack an atlas well a good packing algorithm is needed. It's harder to pack triangles than rectangles but triangles use atlas memory more efficiently and a good triangle packing will outperform the fancy new bindless rendering. Some open source starting points for packing:

https://github.com/nothings/stb/blob/master/stb_rect_pack.h

https://github.com/ands/trianglepacker

The STB headers are mostly built like that: https://github.com/nothings/stb

You could also add an optional 'convenience API' over the lower-level flexible-but-inconvenient core API, as long as core library can be compiled on its own.

In essence it's just a way to decouple the actually important library code from runtime environment details which might be better implemented outside the C/C++ stdlib.

It's already as simple as the stdlib IO functions not being asynchrononous while many operating systems provide more modern alternatives. For a specific type of library (such an image decoder) it's often better to delegate such details to the library user instead of circumventing the stdlib and talking directly to OS APIs.

My stuff for instance:

https://github.com/floooh/sokol

...inspired by:

https://github.com/nothings/stb

But it's not so much about the build system, but requiring a separate C/C++ compiler toolchain (Rust needs this, Zig currently does not - unless the proposal is implemented).

STB Libraries: https://github.com/nothings/stb

stb_ds is also very popular.