mach VS matrix.to

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

Happy to see this on HN =). Lunatik’s main author here. AMA.

Please feel welcome to join us on Matrix [1] as well.

[1] https://matrix.to/#/#lunatik:matrix.org

There is this list of 15-minute bugs that should be easy to tackle https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?bug_severity=critical&bug_s...

Also strarting on smaller KDE applications is usually a great way to start, For example the Plasma widgets/applets or KDE games or educational applications.

You can join the New Contributors char room on Matrix to get help with starting out https://matrix.to/#/#new-contributors:kde.org

There's also https://matrix.to/#/#review-requests:nixos.org

Hi, I'm the Thib person mention in this article, and I agree that QA is super important. I can mostly talk about matrix.org, since I have little power over the Element clients. Disclaimer though: I'm technically employed by Element (to make paperwork simpler since I'm France-based, Element has an entity in France, and the Foundation is UK-based), but I'm working for the Foundation full time.

This kind of article is super valuable since it gives us the perspective of a new user. I opened https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix.org/issues/2178 to translate the gripes mentioned in the issue into actionable items for us. I took action on the most urgent one (updating the Try Matrix page), but want to take the time to go beyond the surface symptoms and address the root cause of the other gripes.

On the Foundation side, we're a small but mighty team of four. The website is currently maintained part time by me and a volunteer who is doing an excellent job at it.

As I wrote recently in a blog post "Tracking what works, not people" (https://ergaster.org/posts/2024/01/24-tracking-what-works/), I would love to have the resources to conduct user research and user testing on the website but I unfortunately don't. We deployed privacy-preserving analytics to see where people drop and what confuses them. It's not nearly as good as proper QA and user testing, but that's what we can afford for now.

Overall I'm grateful to the author for documenting their frustration, and even more grateful for reacting constructively to our responses and integrating them in the blog post! One of the strengths of open source is to find and address issues collectively. I consider this blog post to be a good open source contribution.

If people around believe in our mission and want to help us with their brainpower, I invite them to join our "Office of the Matrix.org Foundation" room: https://matrix.to/#/%23foundation-office:matrix.org

For those aligned with our mission and who want to support us financially, the https://matrix.org/support/ page should give you all the information you need to help us out.

https://matrix.to/#/#openbao-general:chat.lfx.linuxfoundatio...

Hi all,

This project release is a long time coming. It was a big uphill battle, and by far my largest endeavor so far. I built it for Sandstorm because I believe in Sandstorm's model, and I wanted to show that there's still life and potential in it. If you're inspired, joining our OpenCollective would be really helpful: https://opencollective.com/sandstormcommunity (keeping in mind that Sandstorm has now moved from its original leadership to a community project https://sandstorm.org/news/2023-11-03-from-io-to-org).

You can also join our mailing list or connect on the fediverse: https://sandstorm.org/community (The IRC link is outdated, we've effectively moved to Matrix for now due to the libera.chat split: https://matrix.to/#/#sandstorm:libera.chat)

Also: I'm open for hire! You can see some of my skills in putting things together in this blog post. I'd love to work in something FOSS or OSM related, but not a requirement. I mostly do Python and Golang, with a bit of Haskell under my belt. Other projects and resume here: https://github.com/orblivion/me

I really appreciate you sharing your concerns, and for all the hope and energy you've put into Matrix to date. Very much to your point, we're not yet in a state where I recommend Matrix to friends and family. Right now I only use it with people in FOSS and other circles where folks are a little more patient with the tech.

Only time will tell, and of course I'm biased as the Matrix.org Foundation's Managing Director, but I think there's good reason to remain hopeful:

The spec continues to evolve with major improvements expected in feature set and performance in the next year as we get to the 2.0 spec release, the Foundation is staffing up and beginning to fundraise, we're on the cusp of holding our first ever community elections to seat a Governing Board, and adoption has continued doubling on an annual basis.

I invite you and anyone else who is invested and/or concerned to join us in the Foundation's new office room – it's a way to get a view into ongoing activities, ask questions, provide direct feedback, and celebrate all the little wins on our way to collective success: https://matrix.to/#/#foundation-office:matrix.org

Cool! Just in case you haven't come across this, we've got a (rather quiet lately) chat that might be useful.

https://matrix.to/#/#usb-rs:matrix.org