egui VS arewegameyet

Anyone who's interested in the AccessKit integration can play with my work-in-progress branch: https://github.com/mwcampbell/egui/tree/accesskit

It's currently Windows-only, and I'm working on the big missing feature, which is text editing support.

> A core premise of Cocoa, and MVC in general, is that UIs are a projection of data into a different form of data, specifically bits on a screen.

This is a tangent, but the implicit assumption that the UI is visual is just begging for a response from an accessibility perspective, so here goes.

Accessibility is very much an afterthought in native GUIs, not only in Cocoa, but also in Windows with the UI Automation API, and AFAIK with other native accessibility APIs as well. With these APIs, the assistive technology (e.g. screen reader) pulls information from the application (usually via the GUI toolkit), through repeated calls to methods defined by the accessibility API. Often the AT has to do several such calls in a row (and those often translate to multiple IPC round trips, making things slow). And the UI might change between such calls; there's no guaranteed way to get a consistent snapshot of the whole thing, as there is with a visual frame. On the application/toolkit side, these methods may return different responses from one call to the next, and the application or toolkit has to fire the right events when things change.

The web improves on this, in that accessibility information is conveyed through HTML tags and attributes. And yes, this is included in the output of a React component's render function. So while in practice, implementing accessibility may still be an afterthought, it's not an architectural afterthought as it is in native platforms.

One of my goals in AccessKit [1] is to work around this shortcoming of native accessibility APIs, particularly for developers of cross-platform non-web GUI toolkits. In AccessKit, the toolkit pushes a full or incremental accessibility tree update to the AccessKit platform adapter, which maintains the full tree in memory and uses that to implement the platform accessibility API. This even works for immediate-mode GUIs, as one can see in my proof-of-concept integration with the Rust egui toolkit [2].

[1]: https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit

[2]: https://github.com/mwcampbell/egui/tree/accesskit

I can also report some modest progress on my own work on accessibility of immediate-mode GUIs. I have a branch of the Rust egui library [1] that has basic accessibility on Windows using my AccessKit project [2]. I do have a long way to go to make this fully usable and ready to submit upstream, especially when taking non-Windows platforms into account.

[1]: https://github.com/mwcampbell/egui/tree/accesskit

[2]: https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit

arewegameyet

"While the ecosystem is still very young, you can find enough libraries and game engines to sink your teeth into doing some slightly experimental gamedev."

I think Rust for games has come really far. I will cite https://arewegameyet.rs/ "Almost. We have the blocks, bring your own glue.".

All the blocks are there and the language is really well suited to games.

On top of my head:

The pros:

- The crate ecosystem and the package manager makes it really easy to integrate any useful component such as pathfinding, spatial partitioning, graphics backend, audio system.. Most crates take a lot of effort to be cross-platform so I can develop on linux and not spend too much time debugging windows releases.

- The strong typing and algebraic data types makes expressing the game state very pleasant. I also found I was able to develop a very big game without too many bugs even though I don't write many tests.

- Ahead of time compilation + LLVM guarantees you won't have to optimise for weird things around a virtual machine. Rust gives you more control to optimise hot loops as you can go low-level.

- I find wgpu to be the perfect balance between ergonomics and power compared to Vulkan. OpenGL support through wgpu is also a nice addition for lower end devices.

- The Rust community is very helpful, you can often talk directly to crate maintainers

The cons:

- Compilation times, when compared to JITed languages such as C# can be very painful. It can be alleviated by buying a 3950X but I still often get 10-30s iteration times.

- The static nature of Rust means you often need a dynamism layer above to tweak stuff that can be awkward to manage. I made inline_tweak for this purpose but it's really far from how easy Unity makes it. https://github.com/Uriopass/inline_tweak

- Since Rust feels very ergonomic, you are tempted to write almost all game logic within it, so mod support feels very backwards to implement as you cannot really tweak "everything" like in Unity games. Thankfully "Systems" game like Factorio or Egregoria can be theoretically split into the "simulation" and the "entities" so mod can still have a great impact. Factorio is built in C++ so has the same problematic. Their Lua API surface is quite insane to be able to hook into everything. https://lua-api.factorio.com/latest/

Now, I have to talk about Bevy: https://bevyengine.org/. It did not exist when I started but it is a revolution in the Rust gamedev space. It is a very powerful 100% Rust game engine that makes you write game code in Rust too. It has incredible energy behind it and I feel like if I'd used Bevy from the start I wouldn't have had to develop many core engine systems. Its modular design is also incredibly pleasant as you can just replace any part you don't like with your own.

For practical uses of Rust? Whatever you want to program. People use Rust for game development, GUIs, web dev, and more. Anything where abstraction, speed, concurrency, memory safety, etc. are important, Rust will probably be a good fit.

Are we game yet? "Almost. We have the blocks, bring your own glue"

Not seeing anything else that's close to photo realistic. I'm hitting the tough bugs first all too often. More than half my time has been spent on ecosystem problems.

I also know of https://arewegameyet.rs/

Yes — and in fact, Firefox's implementation has been the go-to graphics API for folks trying to make Rust gamedev happen for a long time now. Bevy Engine's renderer is built on it, for example.

They're all/mostly websites about the state of the Rust language ecosystem. For example, can you write games in Rust (https://arewegameyet.rs/) or what's the state of the async (https://areweasyncyet.rs/)