Rust-Bio VS bevy

Does anyone know of zig native libraries for bioinformatics (here is a Rust example https://rust-bio.github.io/ )? It seems as though one could pull in a lot of bioinformatics C libraries such as done with https://github.com/brentp/hts-zig.

e.g. Rust-Bio

I would start with the book and then rust-bio library. Rust is a pretty low level language compared to R/Python. It’s an especially good fit for writing efficient tools that make use of the kinds of algorithms / data structures that are implemented in rust-bio.

Absolutely! It already is, e.g., https://github.com/rust-bio/rust-bio. I'm moving from the academia/nonprofit world into industry bioinformatics, and I intend to use Rust as much as possible. I've already replaced as much of my Python as possible with Rust. I feel I'm able to create larger, more complex programs with Rust because I have the compiler to keep me from making common mistakes that are so easy to make in dynamically typed languages like Perl and Python. It might take longer to write a program initially, but I've started to create a library of functions I can paste together to do things like parse a positive integer, find a bunch of files with a certain file extension, search through data for a pattern, parse CSV files, etc. Writing my latest book has provided even more common patterns I keep finding I use over and over.

I think there is huge potential for Rust in bioinformatics, and there are already some great projects like https://rust-bio.github.io/. It seems industry is also hiring for these skills. This Nature article is a little old, but also covers why people in the field are looking for greater safety and performance. It's relatively easy to write a Python program to do bio stuff, but it's also very easy to get lots of things wrong or for the resulting program to be slow and/or impossible to extend and maintain. In the long run, I think it makes sense to write in Rust. Perl was king in biofx when I started, and I would not have predicted it being displaced by Python, so there's good reason to believe that Python may one day be eclipsed by Rust.

Well, someone mentioned https://rust-bio.github.io/

So generally stuff in this maths/numerical space. The term is a bit deceptive because it rarely means domain-specific science libraries like rust-bio even thought that might be what you think when you hear "scientific computing".

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