mach VS WSL

Myself and many others are betting on Zig in major ways, I truly think it has a bright future ahead.

In spare time, myself and a few others are working on a game engine in Zig[0], and the Zig core team has been very receptive to addressing issues our project faces and supporting us.

Others are working on pixel art editors[1], open source 2D RPG games[2], there's a group of independent folks working on a 3D massive immersive sim game[3], a group working on making Zig an amazing language for micro-controllers[4], etc.

Please consider donating $5-10 a month to the ZSF! They are a great group of people, and it has so many knock-on effects for others in the FOSS community. :)

[0] https://machengine.org/

[1] https://github.com/foxnne/pixi

[2] https://github.com/foxnne/aftersun

[3] https://github.com/Srekel/tides-of-revival

[4] https://github.com/ZigEmbeddedGroup

I don't know if there's anything better than a zip. For our website[0] which includes a bunch of docs for our game engine, Zig packages, etc. we just offer a link "offline version of this site" in the footer which is an ~80MB zip file.

I think the challenge with zip files is.. do you want all the images? do you want all versions of the docs, or just a specific version of the docs? It's hard to tailor the zip to the user's desire. But zip still seems to be the best.

[0] https://machengine.org/

Cool to see others working on this problem. I hope more people do.

Funnily I've seen a lot of programmers and math folks who express how truly, genuinely beautiful Beziers and the math behind them are. But I've never met an artist or graphic designer who didn't express some deep frustration at Bezier controls and how hard they are to work with.

There are even games[0] which make a mockery out of how hard Bezier controls are to use, where the game is purely using the controls.

Controls are just one side of the problem, in my view; the other side is that cubics are terrible for GPUs, they don't understand them - and I believe many of the best 2D graphics libraries today are not even fully GPU accelerated, e.g. Skia. There are folks working on compute shader-based approaches, where we try to shoe-horn this CPU-focused algorithm into GPUs and pray - but it still isn't really suitable.

The controls suck for artists, and the math sucks for GPUs. This is only true of cubics, if you restrict yourself to quadratics (although that brings other challenges), both the control issue goes away (you can just click+drag the curve!) and the performance issue goes away (quadratics are triangles, GPUs love them)

That's the summary of the talk[1] I gave at SYCL'22. In that talk, I didn't have time to present the downsides of quadratics (which are real) - so if you watch it please keep that in mind - but my overall point I think is a solid one: the controls suck, and GPUs can't handle them.

The only reason we stick with cubics in its current form is because of SVG, compatibility with existing tooling, etc. But isn't it crazy? We have new bitmap image formats all the time, and so few vector graphics formats.

In Mach engine[2] we're continuing to explore this space, end-to-end, from author tooling -> format -> rendering. I'm not claiming we have a perfect solution, we don't, but we're at least thinking about this problem. Kudos to the authors of this article for thinking about this space as well.

[0] https://bezier.method.ac/

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTybQ-5MlrE

[2] https://machengine.org

A game engine https://machengine.org is being written in zig, there's also https://microzig.tech as zig is well suited to embedded development.

https://github.com/hexops/mach (shameless plug)

Zig fits pretty naturally here too. We've got ~19 WebGPU examples[1] which use Dawn natively (no browser support yet), and we build it using Zig's build system so it 'just works' out of the box with zero fuss as long as you grab a recent Zig version[2]. No messing with cmake/ninja/depot_tools/etc.

WASM support in Zig, Rust, and C++ is also not equal. C++ prefers Emscripten which reimplements parts of popular libraries like SDL, for me personally that feels a bit weird as I don't want my compiler implementing my libraries / changing how they behave. Rust I believe generally avoids emscripten(?), but Zig for sure lets me target WASM natively and compile C/C++ code to it using the LLVM backend and soon the custom Zig compiler backend.

[1] https://github.com/hexops/mach-examples

[2] https://github.com/hexops/mach#supported-zig-version

We're building Mach which aims to be competitive with Unity/Unreal/Godot in spriti, but super modular / let you pick and choose which parts to use or build yourself.

git clone --recursive https://github.com/hexops/mach-examples cd mach-examples/ zig build run-sprite2d

It absolutely 100% can be true.

As an example: Windows Services for Linux 2 used a special init daemon to interact with the host OS.

That meant no systemd. That meant that the `systemctl` program wasn't there.

This baffled legions, armies, of wannabe sysadmins.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55579342/why-systemd-is-...

https://superuser.com/questions/1785697/systemd-in-wsl-on-wi...

https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/9477

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1132230/unable-to-run-any-sy...

People on the whole have no idea how this stuff works, and they just copy magic incantations from StackOverflow to get stuff to happen. If that doesn't work, then this OS is broken. The end.

For these guys, WSL was broken.

Result:

MS hired Lennart Poettering.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/07/lennart_poettering_re...

He "fixed" it. Systemd now works in WSL2. All those guides for noobs now work. Everyone is happy.

In a world where tools like Flatpak and Snap are proliferating and it's driving deep divisions between Linux distros, if you think the average person struggling with Linux is going to use `ldd` to work out where the dependencies for something live, I'm afraid you are a deep guru who lives on a different plane of existence.

We now have widely-used packaging systems which simply embed an apps entire dependency tree into a package to avoid people having to work out the difference between `apt` and `rpm`. Thousands of terabytes of disk are being burned to make this stuff go away.

Yes, this is too hard. Way too hard.

Better source: https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/873#issuecomment-425...

One of the bugs where on the Docker side. As I have said, there have been several since release with a lot of impact period overlap. The latest and greatest is not resolved.

It's the issue of abysmal I/O performance in communication between the mounted WSL2 virtual hard disk and Windows mounts inside the WSL2 distro.

I found this github page and I was able to reproduce this from the answer

* Docker engine and not Docker Desktop in a VM. WSL2 works well after some configuration: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/6655#issuecomment-11...

Seems to more of a Defender issue than a WSL one, see https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/8995

After adding exclusions for the fsnotifier-wsl process and and both variants of the WSL distro path my disk performance was improved.

Adding the idea64.exe process also helped since I was trying to run IntelliJ against projects inside WSL.