Godot 4.5 release

I’m not using Godot, and I don’t think Godot will be the chosen one for what I’m about to describe but… I think the next biggest application development ecosystem (think Electron, Flash, Qt, gtk, React Native, Java, etc) will be a fully featured game engine, probably one that doesn’t exist yet. Because at the core a game engine is really just task and state management, standardized message passing, event loop, input handling, and abstracting away hardware/platform details. Then they typically have advanced tooling like is outlined in that post, people (in general) will eventually want to mix WYSIWYG, scripting, and native code in a manageable way.

I’ve been looking at the state of Rust GUIs and it’s kind of blowing my mind how much the cores of all of UI in Rust are game engines in everything but name and the general extensible mindset and tooling that comes with a game engine. (I’m talking about Zed and it’s GUI system, Vello, etc.) People are using game engine ‘design patterns’ all over the place now too, like so many of these have an “ECS”.

Bevy kind of blew my mind in this way because if you initialize it with just the core functionality it’s literally:

1. Application lifecycle management (Which is highly configurable, like running until you hit SIGINT or otherwise post a termination event internally, or just running a single “frame” and shutting down)
2. ECS
3. Task Scheduler (Which is swappable)
4. Resource management (Think a data store for all loaded fonts or such)