pulldown-cmark VS bevy

As a platform that allows expressiveness, we want our users to be bold enough to ask and answer questions with either plain text or some markdowns. Compiling markdown to HTML in Rust can be done via the pulldown-cmark crate. We used it in this utility function:

I also really like this paradigm. It’s just that in old crusty null-terminated C style this is really awkward because the input data must be copied or modified. But it’s not an issue when using slices (length and pointer). Unfortunately most of the C standard library and many operating system APIs expect that.

I’ve seen this referred to as a pull parser in a Rust library? (https://github.com/raphlinus/pulldown-cmark)

Really glad to see this! Really want an easy way to render graphs in Rust without resorting to the graphiz binary.

What is the current status? Not seeing it listed anywhere, like if there are features that are not supported or if it uses certain layout algorithms but others are desired.

Would you be willing to make a `[lib]` available? I see you have a `lib.rs` but it'd be great if using it didn't require pulling in `[[bin]]` dependencies (you can mark them as optional and mark `required-features` on your bin like pulldown-cmark does [0] or split it into a separate crate in a workspace). It'd also be good to find an available name for the lib and get it published (looks like someone might be squatting on `layout`).

[0] https://github.com/raphlinus/pulldown-cmark/blob/master/Carg...

Author here. I actually was not aware of cmark.ex - thanks for pointing it out.

In this case the code reuse was more important than pure native speed. We already had a Rust library that used pulldown-cmark [1] with some custom tweaks that we wanted to duplicate. Maybe this behavior could have been copied using cmark.ex too (we thought about doing this in pure Elixir, as mentioned in the post), but given how straightforward Rustler made integrating our existing code, this seems like the better choice.

[1] https://github.com/raphlinus/pulldown-cmark

It turned out that making the most popular Elixir Markdown processor, Earmark (originally written by Dave Thomas) and pulldown-cmark, a Rust Markdown processor, produce the same output was going to be difficult. We also required some customization that was not available in both libraries.

The crate that's closest to production quality code is pulldown-cmark, but I don't hold it up as an example of well-written code, because it's not particularly easy to understand and there's a lot of very low level code to consume the CommonMark syntax - that helps with code bloat and compile time, but not clarity.

The Markdown processor is pulldown-cmark, which supports these extensions:

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