mach
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mach | nomicon | |
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36 | 87 | |
2,759 | 1,682 | |
5.0% | 3.3% | |
9.6 | 5.5 | |
5 days ago | 12 days ago | |
Zig | CSS | |
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later | Apache License 2.0 |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
mach
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Zig Software Foundation 2024 Financial Report and Fundraiser
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. :)
[1] https://github.com/foxnne/pixi
[2] https://github.com/foxnne/aftersun
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DevDocs
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.
- Not only Unity...
- Mach - Zig game engine & graphics toolkit
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New Bรฉziers from Math
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.
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0.11.0 Release Notes
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.
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Significant examples of Zig software (June 2023)?
https://github.com/hexops/mach (shameless plug)
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Learn WebGPU
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.
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Zig for gamedev?
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.
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Mach (Zig) Adventures - Part 1
git clone --recursive https://github.com/hexops/mach-examples cd mach-examples/ zig build run-sprite2d
nomicon
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[Media] I'm comparing writing a double-linked list in C++ vs with Rust. The Rust implementation looks substantially more complex. Is this a bad example? (URL in the caption)
itโs even written by the same person that wrote the Nomicon (the guide to the dark arts of unsafe)
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Rust books to read
If you want to dive deeper you can always have other options but now there are concrete cases, if you want to do low level thing https://doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/ while if you want multi thread/concurrency stuff https://marabos.nl/atomics/ . There are many many books so you will have to point yourself to what you want
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Thread-shared boolean flag
Nonononono. SeqCst is the most error prone memory order: https://github.com/rust-lang/nomicon/issues/166
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[Media] Hashmap behaviour inside a loop due to lifetime issue
Hope this helps. For more details, see the Rustonomicon. I referenced the subtyping chapter here extensively.
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Unsafe Rust
Nice video! Glad I could help out. This stuff is hard, and I'm still learning a lot about it myself even years later. The Rustonomicon is a great read if you haven't already.
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Stepping up the YAML engineer game
Have you got a moment to read through the good book , after reading through this perhaps try the Rustonomicon.
- Questions about ownership rule
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CppCon 2022 Best Practices Every C++ Programmer Needs to Follow โ Oz Syed
That is not what UB means. Undefined Behaviour is behaviour that the compiler is allowed to assume will never happen, and which can consequently cause miscompilations due to optimisation passes gone wrong if it does in fact occur in the source code.
It's true that Rust does not have a written specification that clearly delineates what is and isn't UB in a single place. But:
1. UB is impossible in safe code (modulo bugs in unsafe code)
2. There are resources such as the Rustinomicon (https://doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/) that provide a detailed guide on what is and isn't allowed in unsafe code.
In practice, it's much easier to avoid UB in Rust than it is in C++.
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How to write deserializer for custom binary protocol?
However, this is a wide topic out of scope for a Reddit comment, so maybe just read the Rustonomicon. It explains everything about data handling in Rust.
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Performance critical ML: How viable is Rust as an alternative to C++
The ownership model & borrow checker makes rust a bit of an awkward language in which to write complex data structures like trees and graphs. It can be done - since you can always use raw pointers & unsafe code when you absolutely need to to treat rust like C. But the language fights you, and the community can get a bit moralistic about this sort of thing. The rust nomicon is a fantastic resource for learning the limits of the borrow checker, and where and how to use unsafe code correctly. You will need unsafe less than you think you will, but sometimes you will have no choice.
What are some alternatives?
SDL.zig - A shallow wrapper around SDL that provides object API and error handling
book - The Rust Programming Language
zig - General-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust, optimal, and reusable software.
mdBook - Create book from markdown files. Like Gitbook but implemented in Rust
quickjs-emscripten - Safely execute untrusted Javascript in your Javascript, and execute synchronous code that uses async functions
rust-ffmpeg - Safe FFmpeg wrapper.
zigstr - Zigstr is a UTF-8 string type for Zig programs.
Theseus - Theseus is a modern OS written from scratch in Rust that explores ๐ข๐ง๐ญ๐ซ๐๐ฅ๐ข๐ง๐ ๐ฎ๐๐ฅ ๐๐๐ฌ๐ข๐ ๐ง: closing the semantic gap between compiler and hardware by maximally leveraging the power of language safety and affine types. Theseus aims to shift OS responsibilities like resource management into the compiler.
arocc - A C compiler written in Zig.
Exercism - website - The codebase for Exercism's website.
mach-glfw-vulkan-example - mach-glfw Vulkan example
miri - An interpreter for Rust's mid-level intermediate representation