Testing the Swift C compatibility with Raylib (+WASM)
48 points - last Sunday at 1:47 PM
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Never ever worked for me. Imagine, you actually learned basic Swift and Raylib, now you want "advanced" features in your game like navigation/pathfinding, model loading, ImGui, skeletal animation (those are actually vital for gamedev). You realize that
- Navigation is only ReCast which is pure C++ library,
- ImGui has C++ API as first-class citizen,
- Decent animation with compression is only open-sourced by OzzAnimation which is pure C++ project.
For gamedev interfacing with C is never enough, half of ecosystem is built heavily on C++. Even C++ interop is not enough (see Dlang). Without all those libraries you are bound to make boring 2d platformers.
Same for Zig, Odin, C3 etc.
I might be interested on how to build the WASM build more easier with Swift tools. I guess some tools exist to facilitate the final builds, but did not found it...
Do not hesitate to comment if someone experienced this before.
Because Apple won't fix Swift's abysmal compile times, and there are languages with similar or better ergonomics without that flaw.
A more interesting question would be how well the C++ interoperability works that was added in Swift 5.9, does it work with all C++ headers, even headers that make extensive use of template code. Also how does Swift extract information needed for lifetime tracking, e.g. C++ APIs that return smart pointers and object lifetime ends on the caller's side. Does this only work for C++ stdlib smart pointer types, or are custom types also supported.