libCat VS arewegameyet

That's awesome! I'm working on something that sounds similar. https://github.com/cons-cat/libcat

I'd love to see your work if you're willing to share it here!

This runtime size bothers me a lot. So much that I've been working on a new runtime for C++ that breaks POSIX compatibility to keep binaries as small as they can be. The hello world with LTO is 330ish bytes right now, and I think that can get smaller. https://github.com/Cons-Cat/libCat

I'm working on a library that replaces both C++ and C/POSIX standard libraries (https://github.com/Cons-Cat/libCat), but even then I need to define a few std:: namespace symbols for some features. In the case of std::initializer_list, my answer is just don't use that feature, because you don't really need it.

It's worse in the standard library than it has to be. When I refactored my traits to minimize template instantiations and lean on concepts as much as possible, I measured over 30% improvement to clean build compile times. It's not possible for the standard to do this, because it would subtly change the API. For instance, you can't instantiate or take the address of a concept, but you can for a type-trait class. No reason you'd want to do that, but you can, so they can't "break" the standard library by optimizing this.

This doesn't have to be true. Over the past year I've made progress towards demonstrating how even non-freestanding C++ can be written without any C or C++ standard library headers or DLLs (with large benefits). There are a few names which the compilers require to be in the std:: namespace, though, but they're very special features like source_location and construct_at with semantics that can't be expressed otherwise.

This bit cast has no overhead in debug mode, and is a little bit more generally useful than std::bit_cast(), but cannot be constant evaluated. https://github.com/Cons-Cat/libCat/blob/main/src/libraries/utility/implementations/bit_cast.tpp

It isn't that hard to put a predicate into a type. We have lambdas in an unevaluated context, CTAD, and templated type aliases. https://github.com/Cons-Cat/libCat/blob/main/src/libraries/scaredy/cat/scaredy https://github.com/Cons-Cat/libCat/blob/main/src/global_includes.hpp#L70 https://github.com/Cons-Cat/libCat/blob/main/src/libraries/linux/cat/linux#L289 You do it like this.

But suppose that you have code with no standard library calls at all. Would it still make sense to choose this naming convention? This is actually possible, with a few special exceptions. GCC requires that an implementation of std::source_location has very particular class member names, GCC assigns special semantics to a few function names including std::construct_at and std::move (people seem to know it's inlined, but did you know std::move is required for move-related warnings?), and most intrusively of all, a promise_type must be snake_case. Other names can be worked around by using them into a different namespace with a different letter-case, but promise_type seems unavoidable.

I use C++ for a low-level Linux runtime. Other people are using it for operating systems like SerenityOS and Zircon/Fuschia. People also use C++ for making more compilers like GCC and LLVM.

arewegameyet

"While the ecosystem is still very young, you can find enough libraries and game engines to sink your teeth into doing some slightly experimental gamedev."

I think Rust for games has come really far. I will cite https://arewegameyet.rs/ "Almost. We have the blocks, bring your own glue.".

All the blocks are there and the language is really well suited to games.

On top of my head:

The pros:

- The crate ecosystem and the package manager makes it really easy to integrate any useful component such as pathfinding, spatial partitioning, graphics backend, audio system.. Most crates take a lot of effort to be cross-platform so I can develop on linux and not spend too much time debugging windows releases.

- The strong typing and algebraic data types makes expressing the game state very pleasant. I also found I was able to develop a very big game without too many bugs even though I don't write many tests.

- Ahead of time compilation + LLVM guarantees you won't have to optimise for weird things around a virtual machine. Rust gives you more control to optimise hot loops as you can go low-level.

- I find wgpu to be the perfect balance between ergonomics and power compared to Vulkan. OpenGL support through wgpu is also a nice addition for lower end devices.

- The Rust community is very helpful, you can often talk directly to crate maintainers

The cons:

- Compilation times, when compared to JITed languages such as C# can be very painful. It can be alleviated by buying a 3950X but I still often get 10-30s iteration times.

- The static nature of Rust means you often need a dynamism layer above to tweak stuff that can be awkward to manage. I made inline_tweak for this purpose but it's really far from how easy Unity makes it. https://github.com/Uriopass/inline_tweak

- Since Rust feels very ergonomic, you are tempted to write almost all game logic within it, so mod support feels very backwards to implement as you cannot really tweak "everything" like in Unity games. Thankfully "Systems" game like Factorio or Egregoria can be theoretically split into the "simulation" and the "entities" so mod can still have a great impact. Factorio is built in C++ so has the same problematic. Their Lua API surface is quite insane to be able to hook into everything. https://lua-api.factorio.com/latest/

Now, I have to talk about Bevy: https://bevyengine.org/. It did not exist when I started but it is a revolution in the Rust gamedev space. It is a very powerful 100% Rust game engine that makes you write game code in Rust too. It has incredible energy behind it and I feel like if I'd used Bevy from the start I wouldn't have had to develop many core engine systems. Its modular design is also incredibly pleasant as you can just replace any part you don't like with your own.

For practical uses of Rust? Whatever you want to program. People use Rust for game development, GUIs, web dev, and more. Anything where abstraction, speed, concurrency, memory safety, etc. are important, Rust will probably be a good fit.

Are we game yet? "Almost. We have the blocks, bring your own glue"

Not seeing anything else that's close to photo realistic. I'm hitting the tough bugs first all too often. More than half my time has been spent on ecosystem problems.

I also know of https://arewegameyet.rs/

Yes — and in fact, Firefox's implementation has been the go-to graphics API for folks trying to make Rust gamedev happen for a long time now. Bevy Engine's renderer is built on it, for example.

They're all/mostly websites about the state of the Rust language ecosystem. For example, can you write games in Rust (https://arewegameyet.rs/) or what's the state of the async (https://areweasyncyet.rs/)