manylinux VS mach

I use manylinux containers as the OS for compilation. It tries to ensure as much cross-os / libc / etc.. as much as possible for precompiled libraries. https://github.com/pypa/manylinux

Just to clarify for anyone who isn't aware, the "compiling issues", at least historically, have been that that Alpine uses musl, and PyPI's manylinux wheels are built against old glibc versions. So stuff like numpy that would trivially and quickly install from whl on glibc distros (like a bare-bones Ubuntu image) trigger compilations and the installation of build-only dependencies on Alpine.

That said, it looks like as of late-2021, at least some projects are offering musllinux wheels as well, per the discussion here: https://github.com/pypa/manylinux/issues/37 (not numpy, though: https://pypi.org/project/numpy/#files)

It's very hard. Incompatible glibc ABIs make this nigh impossible, there's a reason Steam installs a vcredistributable.dll for pretty much every game on Windows.

Look no further than the hoops you need jump through to distribute a Linux binary on PyPI [1]. Despite tons of engineering effort, and tons of hoop jumping from packagers, getting a non-trivial binary to run across all distros is still considered functionally impossible.

[1]: https://github.com/pypa/manylinux

As a user, if you build every python package from source, it's ok. But if you a maintainer of an OSS project and you need to publish binary packages for it, then you will hit the trouble. Binaries built on Ubuntu 20.04 can only support Ubuntu 20.04 and newer. So you'd better to choose an older Linux release to target broader users. Now most python packages choose CentOS 6 or 7. See https://github.com/pypa/manylinux/issues/1012 for more details. They need help!

I recently learned that Clang supports this kind of cross-compiling out of the box. https://mcilloni.ovh/2021/02/09/cxx-cross-clang/

The main difference is that Clang does not ship with headers/libraries for different platforms, as Zig appears to do. You need to give Clang a "sysroot" -- a path that has the headers/libraries for the platform you want to compile for.

If you create a bunch of sysroots for various architectures, you can do some pretty "easy" cross-compiling with just a single compiler binary. Docker can be a nice way of packaging up these sysroots (especially combined with Docker images like manylinux: https://github.com/pypa/manylinux). Gone are the days when you had to build a separate GCC cross-compiler for each platform you want to target.

Now you come and use manylinux to build. (https://github.com/pypa/manylinux) so you are based on the CentOS 7 toolchain (at best if you use manylinux2014) or Debian 9 toolchain (if you use manylinux_2_24).

I think the generally accepted way to do that would be a container image running a relatively old distribution. This is exactly what python packages do when they need to distribute binary packages on linux [0]. You are supposed to compile the package in a container (or VM) that runs CentOS 7 (or older if you want broader support), although now the baseline is moving gradually to Debian 9.

[0]: https://github.com/pypa/manylinux

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