metalang99 VS bevy

There are also other approaches. Macro variants making use of `__VA_ARGS__` would be probably the best trade-off. If you want a slightly more ergonomic syntax, something like Metalang99 [1] will help (and the author even wrote a post about this exact subject [2]). Codegen is another option which may work better than other options depending on the situation and exact implementation strategy. And there is always the Reflection TS [3], which may or may not be incorporated to C++26...

[1] https://github.com/Hirrolot/metalang99

[2] https://hirrolot.github.io/posts/pretty-printable-enumeratio...

[3] https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/experimental/reflect

I went down the rabbit hole with C99 metaprogramming after reading through the list. For reference: https://metalang99.readthedocs.io/en/latest/, https://github.com/Hirrolot/metalang99

Honestly I have to disagree. There is nothing particularly special about what Super Template Tetris(STT) is doing.

At its core, template metaprogramming is just functional programming at compile time. STT is just a template and a runtime function which do the following:

1, take an input via compile time flag (the `-D DIRECTION`)

2. take a type input from an included header file containing the current state (`#include "current_game.h"`)

3. via functional programming, compute the results of a single step of the game.

4. specialise a single function using the results of step 3. this function prints the computed result to the screen and the computed game state to a file (`./current_game.h`).

5. gcc/clang exits. compilation is complete.

6. call the compiled binary.

7. the binary runs the specialised function and prints the outputs.

Sure it's fucky and you shouldn't do that in production but what sane individual is writing a piece of code that at runtime (after compiling) seeks out one of its own source files and modifies that file?

To prevent this from being possible you'd have to remove runtime file IO from the language. The other potential solutions wouldn't work:

1. Remove templates entirely: Still would be possible using https://github.com/Hirrolot/metalang99 which solely uses the preprocessor. Given that the pre-processor is literally just term substitution(a glorified copy/paste engine), if you removed that as well, you'd have to accept no form of metaprogramming at all.

2. Remove the ability to #include other files: Could still be done by doing everything inline. `#include` is just copy-paste anyways so it's more an abstraction than anything else to the compiler and preprocessor, it's basically the same as if all the code was pasted into the same file.

That leaves you with removing file IO. Without IO a programming language is basically useless, particularly as a systems programming language.

P.S. I wrote Metalang99 BTW.

Metalang99, a metalanguage for C99. Simple :)

Just wait until you see some other things by the same author, like https://github.com/Hirrolot/metalang99

I did get a few great responses there as well, though. One was a link to this impressive piece of work: https://github.com/Hirrolot/metalang99/blob/master/examples/lambda_calculus.c

Some preprocessor nonsense: https://github.com/Hirrolot/metalang99/blob/master/examples/lambda_calculus.c

Bevy. A very young engine where you need to write the game entirely in Rust—that was appealing. But fatal flaws overshadowed everything: no editor, the engine brutally enforces the ECS approach, and the game's architecture must literally bend to fit this paradigm. So, you won't migrate to another engine at all—you just throw away all the code and start from scratch.

Missing one of the best choices as long as "maturity" isn't on the top of your list: Bevy - https://bevyengine.org/

Game engine written in Rust, leveraging ECS in almost every place and way, with a really capable WASM export option. Wrestling ECS for the first time might take you some time, but in my experience helps you keep game code as clean and decoupled as game code could be.

I don't see WASM/WebGPU changing anything when it comes to gaming, as an industry, personally. 3d visualizations and interactive websites? Yeah definitely a nice improvement over WebGL 2, if years late.

WebGPU is pretty far behind what AAA games are using even as of 6 years ago. There's extra overhead and security in the WebGPU spec that AAA games do not want. Browsers do not lend themselves to downloading 300gb of assets.

Additionally, indie devs aren't using Steam for the technical capabilities. It's purely about marketshare. Video games are a highly saturated market. The users are all on Steam, getting their recommendations from Steam, and buying games in Steam sales. Hence all the indie developers publish to Steam. I don't see a web browser being appealing as a platform, because there's no way for developers to advertise to users.

That's also only indie games. AAA games use their own launchers, because they don't _need_ the discoverability from being on Steam. So they don't, and avoid the fees. If anything users _want_ the Steam monopoly, because they like the platform, and hate the walled garden launchers from AAA companies.

(I work on high end rendering features for the Bevy game engine https://bevyengine.org, and have extensive experience with WebGPU)

I was working through an example in the repo for the Bevy game engine recently and came across this code

That's possible. I did spend quite a bit of time tinkering with compiler flags, and followed the recommendations.

Some notes I found just now seems to agree with my results, though: https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/issues/3978#issuecomment-...

I cannot recommend immediate mode GUI programming based on the limitations I've experienced working with egui.

egui does not support putting two widgets in the center of the screen: https://github.com/emilk/egui/issues/3211

It's really easy to get started with immediate mode, it's really easy to bust out some UI, but the second you start trying to involve dynamically resized context and responsive layouts -- abandon all hope. The fact it has to calculate everything in a single pass makes these things hard/impossible.

... that said, I'm still using it for https://ant.care/ (https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants) because it's the best thing I've found. I'm crossing my fingers that Bevy's UI story (or Kayak https://github.com/StarArawn/kayak_ui) become significantly more fleshed out sooner rather than later. Bevy 0.13 should have lots more in this area though (https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/discussions/9538)

I've also been enjoying building My First Game™ in Bevy using ECS. The community around Bevy really shines, but Flecs (https://github.com/SanderMertens/flecs) is arguably a more mature, open-source ECS implementation. You don't get to write in Rust, though, which makes it less cool in my book :)

I'm not very proud of the code I've written because I've found writing a game to be much more confusing than building websites + backends, but, as the author notes, it certainly feels more elegant than OOP or globals given the context.

I'm building for WASM and Bevy's parallelism isn't supported in that context (yet? https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/issues/4078), so the performance wins are just so-so. Sharing a thread with UI rendering suuucks.

If anyone wants to browse some code or ask questions, feel free! https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants

These days, some game engines have done pretty well at making compute shaders easy to use (such as Bevy [1] -- disclaimer, I contribute to that engine). But telling the scientific/financial/etc. community that they need to run their code inside a game engine to get a decent experience is a hard sell. It's not a great situation compared to how easy it is on NVIDIA's stack.

[1]: https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/blob/main/examples/shader...

This is the API you need: https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/pull/9774