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.
Perhaps if you're completely devoid of imagination.
It is in fact possible to make video games without deferring to open-source libraries for every single aspect of it.
NIH is a cultural pillar. Even scripting layers are relatively split on if they're in-house or not. It's not uncommon to find both an in-house fork of Lua + a few other completely custom scripting engines all serving their own purpose.
Not a game but similar in terms of programming, all of JangaFX's products (which do very impressive visual effects in real time) are made with Odin.
Yes, it's perhaps easier to glue C++ libs together but C libraries are enough for doing graphics and games.
Dear ImGui via the C bindings is actually quite nice and not much less convenient than the C++ API (the only notable difference is that the C API has no overloads and default params).
E.g. here's a control panel UI (from the below ozz-animation sample) with the 'Dear Bindings' approach (using a custom 'ig' prefix)):
https://github.com/floooh/sokol-samples/blob/d8429d701eb7a8c...
Dear ImGui is a bit of an outlier for C++ libraries though, since it is essentially a C API wrapped in a namespace.
OzzAnimation is also fairly trivial to wrap in an (abstracted) C API, for instance I use this in some of the sokol-samples:
https://github.com/floooh/sokol-samples/blob/master/libs/ozz...
Implementation: https://github.com/floooh/sokol-samples/blob/master/libs/ozz...
...used in this sample:
https://github.com/floooh/sokol-samples/blob/master/sapp/shd...
...WASM live version:
https://floooh.github.io/sokol-html5/shdfeatures-sapp.html
TL;DR: quite a few C++ libraries out of the game-dev world are actually quite easy to access from C or languages that can talk to C APIs, mainly because the game-dev world typically uses a very 'orthodox' subset of C++ (no or very restricted C++ stdlib usage, no rtti, no exceptions, ideally no smart pointers in the public API).
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.
The first two I'd mention are D and Nim. I only wrote ~10k LoC with these languages (so they weren't really for me) but they strike me as similar to Swift. They both optionally support an automatic memory management strategy like GC, (whereas Swift as ARC) and there is great effort put into metaprogramming facilities. Both D and Nim compile much faster than Swift, and offer better error messages than the Swift compiler in the presence of complex generic expressions. In the context of the parent post (games) Nim is especially well equipped with a package ecosystem. D seems a touch less lively, but has a following.
For myself, I prefer the Odin programming language. Full disclosure, I've been donating to Odin for about a year now after happily using it for more than 5. After writing "Orthodox C++" for a while, I stumbled on Odin and feel as if it was made specifically for me. The compiler is fast, and the language has been something like a tutor or mentor for me, as it applies friction in places where I usually waste time. It would take some hand-holding as a first-language though, as some error messages relating to overloading/generics would seem obtuse to a beginner.
EDIT: I've recently been exposed to the Raku language, and it strikes me as sort of a ... dynamic version of Swift? It's jammed full of functionality, with an emphasis on being able to design syntax a-la DSL.
Also I'd add that Swift is sort of part of this new litter of "no-paradigm languages" like Kotlin and C#. I don't think Kotlin can actually dip as low-level as C# and Swift can, though. At least I think only C# and Swift have some kind of safety-wrapped user-level pointer "thing."
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.
They’re using it in their work on FoundationDB. Looks good, but has limitations. Swift can call C++ and vice versa, Swift classes can inherit from C++ and vice versa, but not for all code, and may need work adding annotations on the C++ side. See https://github.com/apple/foundationdb/blob/main/SWIFT_GUIDE.....
There’s a good video on that work from a few years ago that was discussed on HN in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38444876.
Show me a real C++ interop example. Does function, constructor and operator overloading resolve correctly? How about C++26 reflection?
