winit VS bevy

Hi! I’m Aloke, an engineer at Warp.

I’m really excited to share that Warp is now available on Linux! If you’re interested in trying it out, you can download Warp: https://warp.dev/

Building Warp on Linux was quite an undertaking. Warp uses a custom Rust-based UI framework that we built in house and renders natively on the GPU. To get Warp running on Linux, we built a version of our UI framework that supports winit [1] as a windowing backend. We also built a version of our renderer that uses wgpu [2]. Reducing complexity by using these well-supported, cross platform, frameworks let us bootstrap a version of Linux quicker than expected and should make it easier to build Warp for other platforms (like Windows).

Please let me know what you think! Happy to answer any questions, either about the product or about technical challenges.

[1] https://github.com/rust-windowing/winit

This link: https://github.com/rust-windowing/winit has this code:

Have you seen the official example?

That's a bit shortsighted given that there is an active discussion about reducing the interior mutability.

I really need a file dialog for my ImGui-based project in Rust. I tried using this crate but it's wayyyyyyy too old. I also saw this but considering the date it was last updated and the look of the repo, it's not gonna work either. Also I maintain my own library for such things, but it's currently blocked by this issue. What options do I have?

In this case, I used the "A"GPL because this crate could feasibly run on the web. winit has a web backend. At the moment I don't support it (there's a PR that needs to land first), but in the near future it's not implausible that this crate could be used in a web environment.

There are a number of up-and-coming Rust-based frameworks in this niche:

- https://github.com/iced-rs/iced (probably the most usable today)

- https://github.com/vizia/vizia

- https://github.com/marc2332/freya

- https://github.com/linebender/xilem (currently very incomplete but exciting because it's from a team with a strong track record)

What is also exciting to me is that the Rust GUI ecosystem is in many cases building itself up with modular libraries. So while we have umpteen competing frameworks they are to a large degree all building and collaborating on the same foundations. For example, we have:

- https://github.com/rust-windowing/winit (cross-platform window creation)

- https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu (abstraction on top of vulkan/metal/dx12)

- https://github.com/linebender/vello (a canvas like imperative drawing API on top of wgpu)

- https://github.com/DioxusLabs/taffy (UI layout algorithms)

- https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-text (text rendering and editing)

- https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit (cross-platform accessibility APIs)

In many cases there a see https://blessed.rs/crates#section-graphics-subsection-gui for a more complete list of frameworks and foundational libraries)

Name: Francesca! Location: Portland, OR (UTC-7) Looking for: Remote only, full-time or contract. Contact: [email protected] LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/francesca-lovebloom/ GitHub: https://github.com/francesca64 Experience: 4+ years of professional Rust experience; former lead maintainer of winit and creator of cargo-mobile.

Window manager: https://github.com/rust-windowing/winit

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