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Can anyone provide some context? I don't know what GLFW is, and the blog post doesn't really explain. From Googling, I see what it is now, but I don't really ha

Can anyone provide some context? I don't know what GLFW is, and the blog post doesn't really explain. From Googling, I see what it is now, but I don't really have a sense of how important GLFW bindings are. Is this very niche? Or, like is this a major contribution to game development? For that matter, is this mainly going to help Zig game developers, or is this a bit of tooling for everyone, kind of like zig cc?

slimsag 5y ago
Author here, sorry for the missing context. GLFW is very popular among game developers for opening graphics windows in a cross-platform way. This helps just Zig game developers for now, it's not a major contribution to game development (though I hope other things I do with Mach engine in the future will be.) I do think with some minor tweaks this could be used to make bindings for GLFW in other languages easier to install, e.g. by just requiring `zig`, but I haven't done that here.
- losvedir 5y ago
  Thanks! No need to apologize, I'm not in your target audience, and that's fine. Was just curious, is all.
hsn915 5y ago
glfw is very widely known because it's usually one of the recommended libraries to use when starting out graphics programming. It basically a cross platform library to create a window and initialize an opengl context .. or something like that. (It's been _many_ years since I last used it).
- iamcreasy 5y ago
  Is it safe to say that SDL is a strict superset of GLFW?
  - slimsag 5y ago
    I think that is a reasonable statement. SDL includes other functionality like image loading, audio, etc. whereas GLFW is primarily focused just with getting a window with a graphics context for OpenGL/Vulkan/etc set up.
    - cyber_kinetist 5y ago
      SDL’s advantage is that it supports more platforms (like mobile and Switch), and is much more battle-tested with hundreds of games using it, including Valve’s ones. Many people seem to use SDL for only windowing and input and seem okay with it.
bmitc 5y ago
This documentation has a good description of capabilities of it and alternatives. https://www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/Related_toolkits_and_APIs#Context.2FWindow_Toolkits https://www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/Related_toolkits_and_API...

slimsag 5y ago

Author here, sorry for the missing context. GLFW is very popular among game developers for opening graphics windows in a cross-platform way. This helps just Zig game developers for now, it's not a major contribution to game development (though I hope other things I do with Mach engine in the future will be.) I do think with some minor tweaks this could be used to make bindings for GLFW in other languages easier to install, e.g. by just requiring `zig`, but I haven't done that here.

losvedir 5y ago
Thanks! No need to apologize, I'm not in your target audience, and that's fine. Was just curious, is all.

hsn915 5y ago

glfw is very widely known because it's usually one of the recommended libraries to use when starting out graphics programming. It basically a cross platform library to create a window and initialize an opengl context .. or something like that. (It's been _many_ years since I last used it).

iamcreasy 5y ago
Is it safe to say that SDL is a strict superset of GLFW?
- slimsag 5y ago
  I think that is a reasonable statement. SDL includes other functionality like image loading, audio, etc. whereas GLFW is primarily focused just with getting a window with a graphics context for OpenGL/Vulkan/etc set up.
  - cyber_kinetist 5y ago
    SDL’s advantage is that it supports more platforms (like mobile and Switch), and is much more battle-tested with hundreds of games using it, including Valve’s ones. Many people seem to use SDL for only windowing and input and seem okay with it.

bmitc 5y ago

This documentation has a good description of capabilities of it and alternatives. https://www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/Related_toolkits_and_APIs#Context.2FWindow_Toolkits https://www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/Related_toolkits_and_API...