sokol

> but I wish there was a middle ground between it and VK There's WebGPU (probably the best option for teaching), D3D11 and Metal. And (shameless plug): sokol-gfx tries to find a balance between simplicity and modern 3D APIs: https://github.com/floooh/sokol Demos with links to C source and shader code: WebGL2 backend: https://floooh.github.io/sokol-html5/ WebGPU backend (has a couple more demos which use features not available on GLES3.0/WebGL2, like compute shaders): https://floooh.github.io/sokol-webgpu/

If you want to use the learned knowledge I would recommend to use something like Sokol [0] or use the SDL-GPU API [1]. While Sokol is more higher level both can be used. Otherwise learn opengl is a really good introduction. [0] https://github.com/floooh/sokol [1] https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL3/CategoryGPU

Vanilla Emscripten. Most of the higher level platform abstraction (e.g. window system glue, 3D APIs or audio APIs) happens via the sokol headers though: https://github.com/floooh/sokol

Floooh is amazing. One of my favourite libraries ever is Sokol, which is used for those emulators AFAIR: https://github.com/floooh/sokol It hits the spot for me in terms of features, small-size and ease of use/embedding. Every other library has way too much I don't need and way too little that I do. It was also a fantastic code reference for me, when I was porting game code between platforms. It has all the answers I need in it, and I know how to navigate it quite well after those years. If one studies it enough it has enough material for a few reference books.

Yes, technically it's possible by wrapping the ObjC runtime API, see solutions like these: - https://github.com/garettbass/oc - https://github.com/mitchellh/zig-objc Whether that's better than writing ObjC directly is another question, think of ObjC as a convenient syntax sugar wrapper around macOS/iOS APIs which you only need in those parts of your application that talk directly to operating system APIs. Also Apple is maintaining a C++ Metal API wrapper now (ok, technically that's not C): https://developer.apple.com/metal/cpp/ If you just want do to simple 'game-y stuff' (3D rendering, audio, low level touch input) you can also check out the Sokol headers (shameless plug): https://github.com/floooh/sokol, or I guess SDL will work too (especially with the new GPU API in SDL3) - at least the sokol header implementation code needs to be com

Kitty on Mac has a few visual issues that Ghostty doesn't have: - the text rendering looks slightly blurry when comparing side by side (Kitty looks blurry, Wezterm and Ghostty look crisp) - when resizing the window, the window content 'wobbles' (Ghostty is stable, both Kitty and Wezterm have the resize wobble) This wobbling effect is a known issue with Metal views (no idea tbh why Apple can't fix that in the window system), the solution is to 'anchor' the view to one window side during resizing (although not perfect, since during the maximize transition the window content doesn't scale), but the basic wobbling fix is fairly simple: https://github.com/floooh/sokol/pull/963 In general I have the impression that Kitty feels quite 'heavy' on macOS compared to both Wezterm and Ghostty (and iTerm2 which I used before feels heavier than all thos

Or Sokol: https://github.com/floooh/sokol

Unreal/Unity are not the only solutions. There is also bgfx (https://github.com/bkaradzic/bgfx), which is quite popular and sokol gfx (https://github.com/floooh/sokol) which I know of. Of course there are many more lesser known ones.

If you have somebody on the team who was able to write a Vulkan rendering engine, then that same person can also easily pop out a Metal port ... just be careful, that person probably never wants to touch Vulkan again afterwards ;) Otherwise I would expect that the game either uses a library which abstracts away the differences between the system 3D APIs (shameless plug: https://github.com/floooh/sokol, but also BGFX, WebGPU or AFAIK SDL3 is also getting a cross-platform 3D API), or uses a complete game engine like Godot, Unity or Unreal. > Maintenance is always the time consuming part This is the only thing that matters, it's not the initial port that's the problem, but the long term maintenance and customer support and that often doesn't make business sense on non-mainstream platforms like Linux or macOS. But a cross-platform 3D API does

Here's something similar by Garrett Bass: https://github.com/garettbass/oc ...I also experimented a bit with parsing macOS system headers via clang-ast-dump and then code-generating C and Zig bindings but that didn't get far: https://github.com/floooh/objc-ast-experiments ...with a bit of effort and maybe using libclang instead of clang-ast-dump that's definitely feasible though. I guess a similar approach is used by the official C++ bindings for Metal: https://developer.apple.com/metal/cpp/ ...also shameless plug: the sokol headers allow to write simple macOS applications (just a Metal canvas in a window) in various non-Apple languages (currently C, C++, Zig, Rust, Odin, Nim): https://github.com/floooh/sokol ...I'm cheating though and use ObjC under the hood to talk to Cocoa and Metal ;)

You might like https://github.com/floooh/sokol

I'm using Dear ImGui for my cross-platform projects (which includes running in browsers): - https://floooh.github.io/visual6502remix/ - (start the emulators by clicking the little "UI" icon to get the debugger UI) https://floooh.github.io/tiny8bit/ - (start by clicking the little "UI" icon) https://floooh.github.io/sokol-html5/ Platform abstraction is handled through the sokol headers: https://github.com/floooh/sokol Dear ImGui is small and fast enough for running in browsers (it will add up to a few hundred KBytes of WASM byte code). If this is too much "bloat", there are smaller, but also less powerful alternatives like microui: https://github.com/rxi/microui)

I wonder if using your library (https://github.com/floooh/sokol) instead of OpenGL will alleviate some of these issues for newcomers! There's already a sokol port of the learnopengl.com code (https://github.com/GeertArien/learnopengl-examples), so it shouldn't be too hard to match between the tutorial articles and these.

If you're looking for something like this, Sokol is a much simpler alternative: https://github.com/floooh/sokol It doesn't support vulkan though, but if that's important to you you're probably much better off just using vulkan directly since it's supported on all the major platforms.