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Written 2022-03-25
For the last couple of weeks, I've been working on developing cat-box.
I wrote this crate because frankly I was disappointed with bevy and I wanted something more similar to python's arcade library in the Rust ecosystem.
The first thing I did was looking into various rendering backends. In the end, I settled on SDL, particularly the sdl2 crate for Rust, because I felt it was simple and lightweight.
First, I created a Game struct which stored basic window information such as dimensions and window title. I then added a run method which took Rust's version of a function pointer. To this function I passed a reference to SDL's Canvas and EventPump structs. After that, I just called this function and updated the canvas inside a loop.
At this point, I didn't have any way to terminate the render loop. To this end, I made a terminate method. Only one problem: I had to rely on interior mutability because Rust only lets you have one mutable reference to a thing at a time, so I couldn't let terminate take a mutable reference to the Game struct.
After this, I made a simple program which opened a window and waited for a certain key to be pressed before closing the window.
The code for this is on my gitea and published on crates.io. If you spot an issue, feel free to shoot me an email with a description or even a patch!