Technology

Rust

Rust (opens new window) is a systems prorgramming language that guarantees memeroy safety at compile time. Rust doesn't need a garbage collector so the performance is excellent with little to no overhead. There is zero-cost bidirectional interopability with C via the FFI; a basic requirement for communicating with OpenGL on the system. The modern Rust toolchain makes it trivial to have a fast and friendly developer experience.

OpenGL

OpenGL (opens new window) is the go-to cross-platform graphics API with a wealth of learning resources available. Using OpenGL and Rust enables the application to run on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux without much platform specific thought. OpenGL 4.1 is minumum target version as that is the latest version supported on Mac OS. Vulkan was considered, but due the increased complexity of properly implementing a Vulkan based application, OpenGL was the simpler choice.

VS Code

Continuing with cross-platform tools, VS Code (opens new window) is the text-editor/IDE of choice. Using the excellent rust-analyzer (opens new window) extension, it's a decent Rust IDE. With various other extensions, writing shader code and documentation is also pleasant.

GitHub

Several services on GitHub (opens new window) are used:

• It's the main git remote repository for the code
• Issues are tracked on there
• Projects, labels, and milestones help triage those issues
• Actions are used to build and test the code (CI)
• Pages is used to host this website which is deployed from Actions (CD).

Vuepress

Vuepress (opens new window) is a static site generator particularly designed for writing technical documentation. It is what powers this website.