pixels VS arewegameyet

https://github.com/parasyte/pixels

That gives you a simple software framebuffer, and it builds as a native app or for the web.

On a more recent machine, that same (well, more primitive) app with pixels or softbuffer struggled beyond acceptable. But was definitely poorly written.

I’ve ported the application from being based on pixels crate to the powerful bevy game engine

Well, it depends on how you use it; writing to an image buffer isn't much less efficient than writing to any normal buffer (in fact, although displaying your scene to a window efficiently is important, your main bottleneck will be the actual ray tracing loop). You may want to read this article for a practical example of using an ImageBuffer to create and draw a texture with Piston. Other window backends you could use, apart from pixels which was already mentioned in another comment, include minifb and Mini GL, though I haven't personally used them.

You can use wgpu instead of opengl as in the pixels example: https://github.com/parasyte/pixels/tree/main/examples/minimal-fltk

It might be possible but with a raycaster you probably want to be able to easily set all pixels and create your own small engine. Something like the pixels crate should fit your purpose: https://github.com/parasyte/pixels

The reality is that I have used unsafe that is also unsound out of convenience because fixing it is a papercut too many. And this tends to be common! I know enough to spot unsoundness in other projects (sometimes even early). But not enough to be confident in my own abilities to write sound unsafe code. Why? Because it's really flipping hard, that's why!

Also, if you just want to get-things-done, then https://github.com/parasyte/pixels might be a bit better, to avoid reinventing the wheel.

However, I recently got a new M2 Macbook Air and started noticing some super weird behavior. While playing Pokemon Silver with an unlocked framerate, I'd notice that the game would slow down to below 60FPS, even on a release build. After printing a little debugging info I found the culprit in the rendering logic which was handled by the MiniFB crate. At first I thought switching to a GPU renderer (such as https://github.com/parasyte/pixels) would help, and it... kinda did?

pixels uses wgpu and runs fine.

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/)