this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
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Programming
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I'm still confused by this not being cross-platform. It's made in Rust; basically every graphics library is cross platform out of the box, and so is all the file IO stuff. There will be some specialist OS api stuff in places but surely it can't be much.
For once this comment isn't even snark. I acknowledge my ignorance and wonder if someone could explain why the cost is bigger than I think?
Perhaps it's setting up CI and packaging for other platforms? Maybe they want human QA on every release? Maybe the APIs for slick OS integration are more complicated than I realise? (e.g. putting UI in the taskbar)
They're using metal which is Apple only.
But why? I saw their section about rasterising everything on the GPU, and again I find it hard to understand why they need anything more than OpenGL 3.
Their UI looks like it would be an LRU glyph cache and a sprite batcher, and then you'd have 1000fps.
You can get lower latency with vulkan then with opengl. I remember some emulators (gamecube?) talk about why they implemented vulkan.
That sounds plausible. I'm sure having the lowest possible latency was their goal. There are multiple popular rust libraries aiming to provide zero cost abstractions over a common subset of the metal, vulcan and dx12 APIs, but I've never actually used one.