phaser VS GLFW

Gold : GitHub, Phaser Studio, Arcadia

Versatility: JavaScript is not limited to web browsers. It's used in a variety of environments, including mobile app development (using frameworks like React Native), game development (using libraries like Phaser), and even serverless computing (using platforms like AWS Lambda).

This reminds me of my first real dev job, 10y ago, making small facebook games with https://phaser.io it was actually kind of fun now that I think back.

Is it worth it? I think while attempting to create a game engine with the Canvas API and vanilla JavaScript. (I quickly ditched that idea and started using PhaserJS)

I didn't try to build anything with Phaser, but I evaluated it a bit when trying to pick a game engine for a 2D web game.

The tech didn't impress me that much, but it also seemed like the most mature 2D game engine available in JS.

Notably, Phaser 4 was announced ~four years ago and was an attempt to get the project written natively in TypeScript. It looks pretty dead in the water - https://github.com/phaserjs/phaser and having a "best effort" TypeScript experience layered onto Phaser 3 didn't excite me.

Additionally, with browsers gaining support for WebGPU, I expect any game engine worth their snuff to begin rapidly adopting support for WebGPU. As best I can tell, any hope of Phaser supporting WebGPU is lumped into Phaser 4, so... not much to say there.

Overall, it was a little tough for me to tell if I was being overly critical and viewing a mature product as a ghost town, but that's the impression I took away from it.

As far as I can tell, BabylonJS is king in town for a TypeScript game engine, but its focus is 3D experiences. I didn't find an especially compelling 2D game engine. I ended up making a prototype using React + PixiJS + React-Pixi, but that was hardly an engine and had significant performance issues.

Now I am building in Rust with Bevy. It's slow going, creating UI elements sucks right now, but the underlying tech is super solid and I feel good about what I write and what I learn even if I'm dismayed at the pace in which I am creating.

Minecraft runs on various Javas.

And there's a known issue with an interaction between minecraft, Java, and the video drivers that crashes out and it can be traced back all the way to here: https://github.com/glfw/glfw/issues/1997

It's not fixed.

Window context manager - glfw, sdl

Types of tools for creating a gui (and how those tools approximately work): 1. Utilize the native _graphical interface API_, and depending on the platform, they have specific layers to interface: * Wayland, X11, for Linux * [GDI](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/gdi/windows-gdi) for windows * [Quartz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz\_(graphics\_layer)) for macOS Example - GTK uses [wayland](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/blob/main/docs/reference/gdk/wayland.md) ([source code](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/tree/main/gdk/win32)) [X11](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/blob/main/docs/reference/gdk/x11.md) ([source code](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/tree/main/gdk/x11)) GDI ([source code](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/tree/main/gdk/win32)) Quartz ([source code](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/tree/main/gdk/macos)) [How to use wayland display server](https://bugaevc.gitbooks.io/writing-wayland-clients/content/black-square/the-wayland-client-library.html) (TODO missing "animation" section) 2. Utilize opengl _or other low level graphics api's_ with window context, use GPU to render widgets * Window context manager - [glfw](https://github.com/glfw/glfw), [sdl](https://www.libsdl.org/) * contexts and surfaces, reading input, handling events Example: ImGui, NanoVG, Nuklear, raylib Why? Mainly used for game development, but also good for gui's. _(i haven't seen any examples that uses this method that are used for developing general-use graphical user interfaces.)_

GLFW: A library for window creation and managing user input.

Not SDL2, but GLFW has something like that under the tests/ directory:

https://github.com/glfw/glfw/blob/master/tests/triangle-vulk...

I'm not familiar with LWJGL, my 5 seconds on their website makes me think you might be looking for something like GLFW https://www.glfw.org/ to handle I/O and window creation/management.

Consider GLFW3 for windowing and GLAD for function loading. I've used this combination myself successfully. Granted, that is "two things" you need, but OTOH it'll work well.

There is a pattern to it which is usable with every GitHub repository. For example, GLFW v3.3.8 can be fetched from: https://github.com/glfw/glfw/archive/refs/tags/3.3.8.tar.gz

That is a static or import library for glfw. You need add the path to the directory where this file is located to the "library directories", see: https://www.learncpp.com/cpp-tutorial/a2-using-libraries-with-visual-studio-2005-express/