upx VS legion

According to this source:

Following optimization, tools like UPX can compress the resulting binary, significantly reducing file size. This compression is invaluable for resource-constrained environments but adds a decompression step during binary execution.

I have been using UPX but I'm quite sure if there's something out there that offers better compression.

Ah that's nice, long ago I used parchment.js to load a inform7 created z5 file on my website. You could try to compress your executable with upx https://upx.github.io/

In this process, the given packer tool embeds a natively compiled PE into another executable that contains the information needed to unpack the original content and execute it. Perhaps the most well known packer, which is not even for malicious purposes, is Golang's UPX package.

Rewrite in C#, and use an obfuscator on the DLL. You can also write some parts in C++ as many variable and function names are forgotten when compiling. You should also encrypt the PCK, and see if you can embed it. If it's embedded, you can make it more annoying to deal with by packing it with https://upx.github.io/

Another good example of false positives like this would be binaries that are compressed with UPX - the way it works is apparently very similar to how stub-loader malware operates and signature detection tools will flag it as malicious.

This will optimise the release binary to be as small as possible. Additionally with upx we can create really small docker image !

Then I compressed it with upx, cp small.exe smallUpx.exe && upx --brute smallUpx.exe, got a 10752 bytes executable, half the size, but still pretty large

I know bevy, there is also legion from the amethyst game framework.

Wow... Okay. I see you didn't even bother watching the video in full. But, I'll respond in case your misinformed comment manages to deter people from watching it.

You somehow managed to ignore all the points of the talk. Like literally every one of them, and I'm not even exaggerating. And then you somehow both managed to focused on irrelevant details and to talk out of your ass (like, at least be right about the details?), all to make a tangential point about how "sUpErIoRlY sMaRt CpP dEvs ArE" because they know this really basic shit.

Let's start.

First you talk about "borrow checker issues" she's demonstrating in the OOO design. The point here was to illustrate the amount of coupling and "explosion" in size with this approach. The point was "OOO is probably not a good design paradigm for game dev". Then she continues how Rust surfaces this bad design paradigm much earlier than it would've happened in other languages/ecosystems. That's all.

More, what you call a custom allocator with tombstoning/generations are just things that exist with a lot of ECS implementations (regardless of language), and it's just become "tribal wisdom" at this point that this table-esque storage backend work really well with ECS (I dunno which one came first; older game devs might know more about ECS history/evolution than I do).

Also not sure what you mean by "that can fail in most of the typical ways and that she's gained nothing over the cpp implementation while wasting effort to force Rust into allowing her to do something really basic"... Maybe I misunderstand what you mean, but it sounds to me like you're comparing working with `Option` as being the same failure mode as working with `void`. That's just utterly ludicrous nonsense.

Her ECS implementation is... Well, it was made to fit inside a few slides for a 40-minute talk. So, yeah it's not great; there's plenty of small issues with it, but none of them are with Rust, or with ECS itself... Did you expect a production ready ECS library you can copy off of slides and use them in your next game, lol? If anything, her implementation has too much passing resemblance with what a C++ implementation would look like (which is something she's very familiar with and her starting point) than a Rust one. So, I'm just bewildered why this is the bone you decided to pick.

If you're interested in what a production-ish ECS implementation in Rust looks like, check out Amethyst's Legion or Bevy's ECS. Although, Bevy takes takes ECS a few... staircases (rather than steps) further with its own ECS. I really* encourage everyone to read up on Bevy's ECS and check out the unofficial Bevy cheatsheet book; I'm certain at leat UE game devs will know how to appreciate how beautiful and ergonomic the design is, but others should as well). Aside: her ECS implementation is still safer than most C/C++ implementations used in published games, but that's a bit besides the point since that's the borrow checker doing its job.

Anyway, the irony is that she much better explains the pitfalls of her own implementation details that you do and she also explains why they're "fine" sometimes. And it was kinda implied that it's fine (from what I remember) because it's no worse than what you end up doing in C++ or Java when implementing ECS, but at least it's safe in Rust. She acknowledges that there's probably better ways to do it.

Here's a few links on some of the stuff I mentioned:

- https://github.com/amethyst/legion

- https://bevyengine.org/learn/book/getting-started/ecs/

Development on Amethyst (the engine) stopped, the Amethyst Foundation is now focusing on developing engine agnostic tools, like Legion and Distill

Though, Legion Github was not too active during this year, and with the recent shutdown repurpose of Amethyst Foundation its future looks even less promising.

Take a look at legion on how to compose data objects in Rust.

I'm trying to avoid that architecture even though that's the path of least resistance to work with existing ECS libs in rust.This discussion about FFI for legion touches on what I'm trying to accomplish. They use a u32 as a custom type ID to deal with the FFI boundary. The size param would be for each instance of that registered component, so the Vec wouldn't have knowledge of the size of each component (which might be 16 bytes for example). Ideally, components and systems defined in the scripting language are more 'first class' instead of scripts only being invoked by entities with a DynamicComponent. This discussion is very helpful btw, I appreciate your thoughts

In the end, I got something to work (also in issue 269):

I ended up with my own, a bit ugly, code. I'll quote it here, because even deserializing a JSON into Legion components is not 100% trivial task. Someone else filed an issue 268 in Legion, I have filed another one too.

Bevy was introduced in 2020 and the patent was filed in 2018. I don't think any of the ECS mentioned predate the patent filing (looks like legion introduced this model in 2019), so it's not as derivative as it seems in the current landscape.

I have been working on a game using Rust, SDL2 and Legion. I statically link SDL2, which mean that only the parts that I actually use gets included. Also i have been using the include_bytes to include my assets. This creates a single executable that is around 3mb (this is without compiler optimizing for size, it could go lower at the cost of runtime speed). Running (upx)https://github.com/upx/upx on it, it comes out to about 900kb.