rand VS rust-sdl2

Making compatibility promises for distributions means they cannot take advantage of potential advancements in the field.

Defining an error type that is meaningful, portable, and compatible with no-std isn't straightforward. If the std lib's getrandom requires std, then just like that, rand and many other crates won't use it anyway. Using io::Result seems to me to face this challenge.

Some wasm targets can’t generate random numbers at all but in the case of the book because you are using wasm in a browser you can use JS to generate random numbers. I believe there’s a way to get the rand crate to use JS as the backend for generating rand but its a bit more convoluted than the easy one-liner that the book suggests.

rand

This uses rand and xcomplex to handle the mathematics, png to write image files, and dialoguer and indicatif for some pretty prompts and progress bars.

You can often achieve this without any unsafe by putting an assert!() on the length before the hot loop. For example, I got rid of some unsafe in rand that way.

This is a widely used method to map random integers to floating point numbers, but it has the disadvantage of wasting 1 bit of float mantissa precision.

On modern CPUs, its computational advantage over full-precision mapping methods, such as multiplication by a float, is not always clear [1].

[1] https://github.com/rust-random/rand/issues/416

In fact, there are a lot of crates in Rust where in other programming languages, it would be included in the standard library. Examples are regex, random number generators, additional iterator methods, macros for other collections, num traits, loggers, HTTP libraries, error handling, async runtimes, serialization and deserialization, date and time, and many more.

I don't think that SDL and WGPU are really comparable. You'd be better off comparing SDL to something like Notan or even the SDL bindings for Rust. That said, SDL will have vastly more learning resources than Wgpu or Notan or any Rust alternative. If you know and like rust you can probably use the resources with the Rust SDL bindings.

Those are 3 very different libraries. Are you looking for something in the middle, or do you want all of the features you described? For what it's worth, there's SLD2 bindings for Rust https://github.com/Rust-SDL2/rust-sdl2

There's already a Rust binding for SDL2. See https://crates.io/crates/sdl2

nope. https://github.com/Rust-SDL2/rust-sdl2/issues/884 emscripten target won't work yet either.

it seems like what you are looking for is sdl2 bindings

Dude. It's literally at most 50 lines of code, the entire project. What kind of documentation do you expect me to write? The library I'm using is this one. I don't know why you'd need to know anything about it since it's purely something that can appear literally anywhere, it's part of the language.

*and* SDL2-sys *and* Rust-SDL2

The SDL2 crate had something like this, and it's an option I'm considering. However, if possible, I'd prefer a different, simpler GUI library, so if there's an input-specialized crate out there that does this, I'd love it.