Even with the M2 Pro, Mac gaming is as bad as it’s ever been

• SDL

  195 8,310 10.0 C

  Simple Directmedia Layer

  

I've personally shipped some small cross-platform games for win+macos+linux, and it's rather trivial to produce statically-linked versions for windows and macos even from within Linux.

When the experience you encounter attempting the same thing for the linux build is an actively developer-hostile environment the moment you attempt to shove -static in your LDFLAGS and --static in your pkg-config flags, the message seems rather loud and clear: "We don't want you easily shipping standalone proprietary binaries on our systems avoiding learning and using our package management machinery!"

It's rather desirable to hand out standalone executables for such simple isolated programs as games.

Your claim that games don't statically link when possible strikes me as rather odd. It's such a common practice that SDL added an escape hatch to divert SDL calls to another libSDL at runtime [0]. Because sometimes you want a newer SDL to fix/support some newfangled stuff, and not be stuck with the statically linked version. Do you really think the SDL devs would bother with such a thing if it weren't a common practice?

[0] https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/blob/release-2.26.2/src/dy...

• MoltenVK

  103 4,570 9.0 Objective-C++

  MoltenVK is a Vulkan Portability implementation. It layers a subset of the high-performance, industry-standard Vulkan graphics and compute API over Apple's Metal graphics framework, enabling Vulkan applications to run on macOS, iOS and tvOS.

  

I used to play a lot of games on macOS using Wine but the reason many newer games don’t work and DXVK isn’t available on macOS is because Metal lacks some features that have been difficult for MoltenVK to emulate. This means that MoltenVK is only useful if your application/game doesn't rely on those features.

You can find all the details in this issue:

- https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK/issues/203

Reading the latest comments there it sounds like things may improve once Metal 3 is out.

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com featured

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

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