Testing the Swift C compatibility with Raylib (+WASM)

Thanks for sharing it!

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.

Raylib has a C API though, and this is 'easy-mode' in any language (even without integrated bindings generation like Swift or Zig have - e.g. it's fairly trivial to write a bindings generator that uses Clang's ast-dump json file format as input and translates the API declarations into another language.

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.

> ImGui has C++ API as first-class citizen

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).

> A more interesting question would be how well the C++ interoperability works

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.

> Without all those libraries you are bound to make boring 2d platformers.

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.