windows-rs VS learn-wgpu

It's a shame that, unlike with Win32, using WinUI places pretty harsh restrictions on which programming languages and environments you can use. Only C# and C++ are supported, the latter only with Microsoft compilers. For everything else, including Rust[1], Python and MinGW C/C++, there is no answer for OP's question, and the effect of this on the visual consistency of the Windows desktop is obvious - there is none. Every third-party app uses a different toolkit with a different look and feel, because the library providing the standard look and feel simply isn't available to the majority of developers.

[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs/pull/1836

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs

On Windows you'd need to call the LoadLibraryEx method. You'd also need a crate to call Win32 functions, I suggest windows-rs.

windows-rs, Microsoft's crate wrapping the Windows API, already includes the WDK, the special sdk for creating kernel code.

On windows, I'll probably use https://github.com/gabdube/native-windows-gui or https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs both of them seem pretty solid.

*nod* It's an official Microsoft thing generated from official Microsoft API definition files. (The repo is at microsoft/windows-rs on GitHub.)

Microsoft offers official "bindings" to Win32 APIs through win32metadata. However, until recently, it did not include metadata for kernel-level functions or WDK. In early 2021, an issue was raised through windows-rs regarding this limitation, but progress was slow until now. Microsoft has finally released official metadata for WDK, which can be found on the wdkmetadata repository. The latest comment on the issue thread can be found here:

Is something wrong with https://github.com/deviceplug/btleplug or you haven't found it? You could also use bindings to platform libraries like https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs and https://github.com/rust-mobile/ndk if btleplug doesn't have something fundamental to you.

Nice.

Speaking of Snake game, if you want to go even deeper, you can try to use the wgpu crate to combine Rust and WebGPU to write everything from scratch. Here is the tutorial:

https://sotrh.github.io/learn-wgpu/#what-is-wgpu

I once wrote a code editor with wgpu, from font rendering to char/line state management (very rough) for music live coding:

https://github.com/glicol/glicol-wgpu

It runs in browsers, even including Safari!

https://sotrh.github.io/learn-wgpu/ This is probably the best resource out there for learning wgpu specifically. If you're unfamiliar with graphics, the learnopengl one is good. If you've got experience though, jumping right into that one is a shout or looking at some vulkan ones as they're pretty similar in terms of architecture.

- https://sotrh.github.io/learn-wgpu

Most of The WGPU I learnt is from https://sotrh.github.io/learn-wgpu/ but it doesn't really talk about designing n stuff, I thought of checking out the source code for Bevy or even games like veloren. But well, their codebases are pretty big to get started in the first place.

So I was wondering if opting for option 1 would be better to begin with. OpenGL has a much bigger community and wgpu only has its documentation which I hear is not quite up there yet. There is this excellent tutorial for wgpu that I read through, but it seems like wgpu can be a lot more complicated than starting with OpenGL.

I started with wgpu tutorial (https://sotrh.github.io/learn-wgpu/) since I like the idea of portability and it's a Rust-first library, but it seems I'm missing some foundations of how CG works in general: the code is given, a little of explanation like it assumes I already know something, maybe I'm wrong, but I wish there was a longer explicit version.

If you haven't seen it: https://sotrh.github.io/learn-wgpu/ is a good introduction that will explain most of what you asked, then can refer to rend3d or bevys renderer to see how a render graph works.