zig-gamedev VS HandmadeMath

Two game frameworks in the making: https://github.com/michal-z/zig-gamedev & https://github.com/hexops/mach

I did a hangman game, I'm doing a file compression tool next. I asked bing chat to recommend beginner projects for zig and that's what it told me. It also suggested a cli calculator and a cli text editor, but I didn't want to do that. My next thing will be something using https://github.com/michal-z/zig-gamedev

This repo may be useful. It isn't an engine or a renderer, but rather a collection of useful libraries if you do end up writing your own tools. https://github.com/michal-z/zig-gamedev

Something like vulkano in Rust or zig-gamedev in zig might be a much more enjoyable approach: They're similarly bare metal languages but have a lot of advantages over C++ (borrow checker's safety, simpler syntax). However, they're not commonly used by big studios.

I've been working on a gamedev project in zig, using zig-gamedev. It has many libraries you can use, though my game is 2D. Feel free to check out my project if you want to see how I set things up. https://github.com/foxnne/aftersun

If you don't like using heavy libraries such as glm, I recommend looking at HandmadeMath. It is a single file c/c++ math library for graphics programming. You can just drop it into your project. It's lightweight and will save you a lot of time implementing the math yourself. In a lot of cases, it actually uses optimized solutions to save computation time (same with the glm).

HandmadeMath does that for example, so you can take a look at how they've done it: https://github.com/HandmadeMath/Handmade-Math