metal-cpp VS LearnOpenGL

My understanding is the proliferation of “XYZ-cpp” AI frameworks is due to the c++ support in Apple’s gpu library ‘Metal’, and the popularity of apple silicon for inference (and there are a few technical reasons for this): https://developer.apple.com/metal/cpp/

This is basically also what the "official" C++ API for Metal does (https://developer.apple.com/metal/cpp/), it's an automatically generated bindings wrapper which calls into ObjC runtime functions.

I also dabbled a bit with this idea by parsing clang AST-dumps of macOS system headers:

https://github.com/floooh/objc-ast-experiments

Unfortunately this is very brittle, and also broke on ARM CPUs, I guess the shim code needs some ABI adjustments (famously, objc_msgSend has multiple "ABI shapes": https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/objc_msgsends-new-prototype.h...).

There's official C++-interface: https://developer.apple.com/metal/cpp/

It doesn't matter if the project driven by Microsoft or not, the cat (of automatically generated language bindings) is out of the bag. E.g. Zig is using the same approach without being an official MS project: https://github.com/marlersoft/zigwin32, and Apple has an automatically generated C++ API for Metal (https://developer.apple.com/metal/cpp/).

In the future, the question won't be "what language do I need to learn to code on this platform", but instead "are there language bindings for my favourite language".

this? https://developer.apple.com/metal/cpp/

Doesn't it just use objc/runtime.h and if anything is missing you can just add your custom api calls?

Metal has C++ bindings (which cover a full app lifecycle so you don’t have to touch Objective-C/Swift at all) but they’re based on the Objective-C memory model. There are some helper structs mimicking shared pointers, but you’ll still need to understand the basics of how an autorelease pool is used to avoid memory leaks and/or bad access crashes.

On https://developer.apple.com/metal/cpp/ check Foundation folder and all those nice Object::sendMessage().

Also recommended: LearnOpenGL [1] and Vulkan Guide [2]

[1]: https://learnopengl.com/

I want to begin game development as a hobby, but I'm unsure where to start. I did follow through https://learnopengl.com/ a few years ago, and while it was a very interesting experience, I imagine I would need to use an existing engine to be productive.

Do you recommend any books and tutorials aimed at experienced programmers with 0 knowledge of game development/design?

- Game development - Unity3D project based learning in C#: https://learn.unity.com/ - Graphics - There was another user on r/GraphicsProgramming the other day (who teaches Computer Graphics at his university) that linked their lecture series for the entry year of their course here: https://tamats.com/learn/realtime-graphics/ - Project based learning: https://github.com/ssloy/tinyrenderer/wiki - Rendering API tutorials: https://vulkan-tutorial.com/, https://learnopengl.com/

If u want to make 3D game, you'll probably want to learn some 3D shader graphic stuff. OpenGL is a good start. https://learnopengl.com

LearnOpenGl.com

Possibly a smidge outdated.

Goes from blank window to rendering 3d meshes with advanced lighting techniques (HDR, SSAO and more).

Heped me understand shader pipeline, so I recommend it.

https://learnopengl.com

and then https://learnopengl.com/

I'm reading the guest article about frustum culling on learnopengl.com and there's a video demonstrating how it works and for debug purposes they have a bunch of spheres turning red or green which I assume means they're being culled or not so my question is if I wanted to do this do I have to make a mesh for whatever bounding volume shape or is there a specific method for something like this?