future of Mach

[slimsag]

v0.4 was released tonight: this version is effectively just the latest main branch tagged, as you'd expect.

If you are building something with Mach, you should consider switching to this tagged version instead of continuing to use main. We won't continue developing this version of Mach in general, but there is a 0.4 branch where some real-world projects depending on Mach (like Lord of Zero the game, or Pixi) may send PRs if needed in the future. It will not be updated to the latest Zig versions in general. https://github.com/hexops/mach/tree/0.4

Going forward, we are changing the Mach development strategy to aggressively embrace our future of:

• Replacing WebGPU/Dawn with our own graphics API
• Replacing the WGSL shading language with our own Zig shading language
• Replacing GLFW with our own windowing backends

This all means main is going to be unstable, and very likely broken entirely on some operating systems, for a while! Contributions/pull requests welcome.

f you're making something with Mach, you can either help contribute to this new world or you can continue using the old version (v0.4, the old version, was released/tagged today.)

If you're wondering 'why?' - then you should read: #1166

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This PR includes two sweeping breaking changes that will cause large regressions:

• Remove any old example which depends on zmath (does not use mach.math), etc.
• Remove support for Dawn / WebGPU, in favor of sysgpu. sysgpu works fine on macOS but probably has minor issues on Windows and Linux.

A next PR will be:

• Remove support for GLFW, in favor of custom windowing backends.

I

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