My (limited) understanding is that Swift is mostly used to make iOS apps.
The language itself is not limited to Apple platforms, and there are compilers for many others, but until now all the surrounding tooling (IDEs, Swift Package Manager, build toolchain(s), C/C++ interop) has been less than ideal for all non-Apple platforms. Arguably less than ideal on Apple platforms too in some cases ;)
There is still a big difference between "I have Xcode" and "I have VSCode + a large manual toolchain", but the gap is closing. CMake can also generate Xcode projects which is a nice touch when bringing cross-platform code back to Apple platforms.
macOS, Linux, Windoze
Love2D seems close to that, but afaik it doesn't support SDL3 features like the new GPU API.
[0]: It's not like I'm allergic to C++, but I firmly believe when developing something that is mostly interactive, such as complex GUI or games, a language that is garbage collected and can be hot reloaded would be much more apt.
Code reload (because it uses MRuby) is just :chef-kiss:
I haven't used DragonRuby though, so if my above snarky comment is off please point me out.
Also, the attitude much of the wiki / promotional pages are written in for that framework runs me the wrong way for some reason. "Unity and GameMaker rot your brain"... are you kidding me? No they don't. You're still writing real code and solving real problems. They just have more systems in place you have to work within. I don't like the self-righteous attitude. It's fair to not want to go open source if that's your preference, but don't act like people who don't want to use closed-source software where possible are being unreasonable. I also don't see how what is effectively a Ruby wrapper for SDL3 is such an immensely complicated piece of engineering that it needs to cost as much as they're charging for it.
Which I can't.
This always happens every few years. It takes me about a week to get a C++ program compiling and running, and by the end of it, I've lost all motivation, forget how any of it works, and delete it all and move back to TypeScript/web stuff. At least that I know despite all its warts.
[edit] figured it out
Hello me from the future, googling this in a few years. It's actually really simple: just follow the same steps on that page you were on[1] except you HAVE TO run the `vcpkg new --application` and `vcpkg add port fmt` commands in the dev cmd prompt, you can't just add the file manually for some reason, even though that's all it seems like it's doing.
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/vcpkg/get_started/get-star...
I've often taught beginning game dev in a day, and with box2d in love2d you can very quickly make a wide selection of cool games, and while it's not perfect it makes it easy to get started making platforms, doing collisions, all sorts of things.
And I'm a 10+ year gamedev.
Out of all of c++'s sins, the lack of a solid integrated build system is the one that bites me the most.
- Cross platform support well integrating into "native" tooling
- Endless ability to add weird hacks to things to get around problems
The syntax is ...passable. I've never gotten a java stacktrace during a build failure (ahem bazel ahem).
It's straightforward enough to do the horrible things that C++ devs do all of the time like having 3 dependencies from system apt, 2 vendored, actually a 3rd is vendored but only used on windows, where the other 2 come from vcpkg, and 4 of these are statically linked but the last (openssl) is dynamic and accepts any version in order to support both ubuntu LTS and arch, but shipped as a dll on windows.
I have prayed before the CMake gods and they have accepted me.
The worst part about Bazel for C++ is that it’s not yet as widespread as CMake or plain old Makefiles so it can be harder to get third party libraries into your project, but that’s changing quite fast with the bazel registry, and you have things like rules_cc that help you run other build systems inside bazel.
Try the breakout example, I play around with it a lot. You’ll just need the Zig 0.14 compiler and it should be painless.
Half of the problems I got past were thanks to odd blog posts like this with code snippets that I found on google and got me unstuck immediately.
It loads Aseprite files automatically, manages animations, collisions, networking, what have you.
It really isn't.
https://randygaul.github.io/cute_framework/#/topics/game_loo...
You can request a fixed timestep, and your own loop callback will be called at fixed intervals, which allows you to completely ignore delta time.
Come on, if you're going to spell "voilà" correctly, you might as well use it correctly too. "Et voilà!", not "And voilà!" :)
At this point, I demand a good IDE experience: as much intellisense as possible, great debugger, hot reloading.
Anyway, C# and MonoGame was what won at the end of the day, at least to just get the ball rolling. Rider is a great IDE, and MonoGame… at least has great getting started documentation to get me going again. Once I knock out a few cutesy games I’ll probably go build my own thing on top of SDL3, so that I’m not held back by MonoGame. Also the MonoGame content builder is just completely broken on Mac, so on the side I am building my own Rider plugin to bring actually good intellisense to the mgcb file, so that I don’t need the broken editor gui (all it does is manage the mgcb file anyway, arguably should have just been an IDE plugin the whole time)
I tried Dragonruby, really wanted to like it, but the development experience is just… not there. It live reloads, but seems to offer no IDE tooling whatsoever. They talk a lot about emacs, maybe you’re supposed to use it with emacs, which I just have zero interest in doing. You’re also not using MRI, or the full Ruby language, so a lot of tooling for “normal Ruby” may not work. C# is just C# with MonoGame, I can use all the tools, import all the nuget packages (if you really want to), etc.
I felt like going with a C based project would lock me out of having hot reloading, but that might not be true, please let me know if I am wrong!. I know of a C++ hot reloading thing specifically made for game dev, it’s in my notes somewhere, just not sure if it’s suitable for use (you sure do have to sift through lots of abandoned experimental stuff in this world)
Swift has to shed the perception that it only works on apple platforms. I've found the the C++ interop to be pretty good for my computer vision use cases.
DavidPiper•11h ago
Now that Swift + SourceKit LSP + VS Code is a viable environment, and CMake supports C/C++ and Swift interop out-of-the-box, I'm keen to start using Swift for more cross-platform things.
pusewicz•9h ago