zig-gamedev VS vulkano

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

Language-level guarantees of memory safety are not critical to all low-level programmers, and sometimes this is fine!

Developers of games, compilers, digital audio workstations, video editors, and live performance software (such as openFrameworks) likely don't rank memory safety as their top concern.

Zig is already an attractive choice for those domains because it offers:

- Great compile times compared to C++/Rust, and future plans to implement hot reloading as a core part of the tooling: https://www.jakubkonka.com/2022/03/16/hcs-zig.html

- The ability to reason about where data exists in memory: https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#Where-are-the-byte...

- Good readability and learnability, especially if you have a C/C++ background.

- Comptime that enables clean generics, compile-time reflection and general metaprogramming as a happy side-effect: https://kristoff.it/blog/what-is-zig-comptime/

- Better tooling than C/C++. The ability to cross-compile Zig and C/C++ from one machine lets you set up much more stable and reproducible build environments already. You can clone zig-gamedev and have the demos working with just three commands on Windows/macOS/Linux, for example, and two of those three are cloning the repo and changing to the directory: https://github.com/michal-z/zig-gamedev (to build you will need the latest copy of Zig from the 'masters' section for your platform at https://ziglang.org/download/ )

We should all be careful about insinuating that memory unsafe languages should not exist. I see “friends don't let friends use memory-unsafe languages” on social media and feel sick. It's much healthier to embrace the melting pot of Zig, Odin, D, Beef, Vale, Hare, Lobster, Jai, C3, Val, Roc and all the rest and see what new ideas and trade-offs they bring.

Also worth noting that new languages tend to take time to develop their own philosophies to memory safety (Vale's approach is only just now emerging, for example: https://verdagon.dev/blog/making-regions-part-1-human-factor ). Zig's story might not be great now ( https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/how-safe-is-zig/ ), but then it's not Zig's priorty at the moment, and Zig's full story is not yet written.

There is also [Vulkano](https://github.com/vulkano-rs/vulkano). It has a safe high level api and lower level layers, all the way down to [ash](https://github.com/ash-rs/ash) which is more or less raw vulkan. It's more explicit and verbose than [wgpu](https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu) though, so maybe try wgpu first and see how you like it.

Understand Wayland concepts: Familiarize yourself with the basic concepts and principles of Wayland. This will help you gain a solid understanding of how the system works. You can refer to the official Wayland documentation (https://wayland.freedesktop.org/docs/html/) and the Wayland book (https://wayland-book.com/). Learn Rust: If you're not already proficient in Rust, take some time to learn the language. The Rust Book (https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/) is a great place to start. Study existing Wayland compositors: Since you mentioned Anvil and smallvil, you can study their source code to gain insights into how they're designed and implemented. Try to understand the structure and how different components interact with each other. Dive into Smithay: Smithay (https://github.com/Smithay/smithay) is a Rust library for building Wayland compositors. Familiarize yourself with the library and its components. You can start by studying the provided examples and reading the API documentation. Learn graphics programming: Since you're interested in graphics effects, you'll need to learn about graphics programming concepts, such as shaders, framebuffers, and texturing. Vulkan (https://www.vulkan.org/) is a popular graphics API that you can use with Rust. Check out the following resources to learn more about Vulkan and graphics programming in Rust: Vulkan Tutorial (https://vulkan-tutorial.com/) gfx-rs (https://github.com/gfx-rs/gfx), a Rust graphics library Vulkano (https://github.com/vulkano-rs/vulkano), a safe, pure-Rust wrapper around the Vulkan API Start small: Break down the compositor project into smaller, manageable tasks. Begin by implementing basic functionality, like setting up a window and drawing simple shapes. Gradually add more features, such as input handling and window management. Ask for help: Join the Wayland and Rust communities to ask questions and seek advice. You can find them on forums, mailing lists, and chat platforms like Discord or IRC. The Wayland mailing list (https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/wayland-devel) and the Rust programming subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/) are good places to start. Iterate and experiment: As you progress, keep experimenting with different graphics effects and shaders. Try to implement the features you're interested in, such as blur, window previews, and window switching.

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.

Huh? What makes you think that? The commit history looks pretty active.

I use rust with the vulkano library.

rpm-ostree install https://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm https://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm sudo rpm-ostree uninstall akmod-nvidia sudo rpm-ostree install akmod-nvidia-470xx rpm-ostree kargs --append=rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau --append=modprobe.blacklist=nouveau --append=nvidia-drm.modeset=1 sudo systemctl reboot sudo rpm-ostree install nvidia-settings-470xx xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-470xx-power sudo rpm-ostree uninstall xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda sudo rpm-ostree install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-470xx-cuda sudo rpm-ostree install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-470xx-devel sudo rpm-ostree install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-470xx-cuda-devel sudo rpm-ostree install cuda-samples sudo rpm-ostree install vulkan-tools vkmark mesa-vulkan-devel sudo rpm-ostree install libshaderc-devel sudo rpm-ostree install clang clang-tools-extra libstdc++-devel sudo rpm-ostree install glib2-devel glib-devel avahi-gobject-devel sudo rpm-ostree install cairo-devel pango-devel gdk-pixbuf2-devel sudo rpm-ostree install graphene-devel gtk4-devel cairo-gobject-devel sudo systemctl reboot modinfo /usr/lib/modules/$(uname -r)/kernel/drivers/video/nvidia.ko | grep ^version find /usr/lib/modules -name nvidia.ko -exec modinfo {} \; sudo lspci -v | grep -A 20 VGA git clone https://github.com/Rust-GPU/Rust-CUDA.git git clone https://github.com/vulkano-rs/vulkano.git git clone https://github.com/Relm4/relm4.git glxgears glxinfo glxgears glxinfo vkcube vkcubepp ./teapot ./triangle ./occlusion-query ./interactive_fractal

I use the awesome Vulkano for rendering and computation, and Rapier for simple physics. Contour is used for the initial shapes, but rapier forms the physics colliders from it. Hecs is used as well. And you might recognize Egui as gui :). I gotta say, I'm starting to be pretty happy with the rust ecosystem overall.