My curated list of cool/useful crates for game development. Crates often have strange names that are difficult to remember or do not make it obvious what they do. This repository is where I keep track of crates I've found that may be useful for certain problems or projects.
| Crate | Description |
|---|---|
| mint | interoperability layer between math types of different graphics APIs |
| crunch | space-efficient rectangle packer |
| delaunator | triangulation of 2D points, good for mesh/collider gen, or any procedural stuff like that |
| arboard | text/image clipboard support, useful for editors/etc. especially because of the image support |
| bincode | very fast + compact binary serializer, output is nearly same size as in-memory structs, great for simple inline serialization |
| strum | add lots of reflection to enums (names, count, enumerate over their values, etc.), great to remove boilerplate and prepare enums for in-editor dropdown support |
| glam | my current favorite of the fast linear algebra (vectors, matrices, etc.) crates, designed for games/graphics, and has some SIMD-support |
| euc | simple and to-the-point software renderer, good for debugging or tooling, and also as studying material |
| glow | nice OpenGL bindings/wrapper |
| glsl | glsl 450/460 parser, which creates a syntax tree out of opengl shader code, very simple to use and navigate |
| lyon | very nice path tesselation library, for generating meshes from vector contours/paths |
| msdf | generate multi-signed distance fields out of contours, good for generating + baking textures for fast, scalable fonts |
| rfd | rust file-dialogs, useful for native save/load/etc. for editors and tooling |
| strsim | "string simularity" metrics, useful for fuzzy text searching (eg. in an editor when you want to search assets/sprites/etc.) |
| ulid | i like this for guid generation, which uses the ulid specification to generate 128-bit unique IDs that have nice string representations |
| wgpu | extremely powerful+sophisticated web-gpu cross platform rendering library, can output to metal/vulkan/dx/wasm, has its own shader language. the whole deal, very good |
| naga | great companion to wgpu, a shader parser that can parse and translate shaders. i've found it useful for evaluating shaders to automate some of the graphics code, as well as validating shaders' compatibility for engines/targets |
| winit | the de-factor windowing library for rust, quite good compared to what i've used in any other language. feels very much like using SDL |
| thiserror | my favorite library for creating error structs/enums with nice display implementations (reduces lots of boilerplate and can generate from-impls as well, etc.) |
| bytemuck | library with traits/methods for making your structs readable/writable as byte arrays, useful for uploading them into graphics APIs like wgpu or opengl |
| memoffset | nice companion to bytemuck, allows you to get memory offsets of struct fields, useful for setting up vertex attributes or uniform buffers for graphics APIs |
| gilrs | gamepad input library, really great API, controller layout/bindings/event handling, and haptic support |
| image | very full-featured image decoding library with support for lots of common formats |
| png | the image crate is very large, so for merely PNG support, using this directly makes for a faster compile and smaller dependency footprint |
| approx | floating point approximation, great for those times where pesky f32's are deciding to be never quite equal. should be used in place of direct equality checking as often possible |
| rand_xoshiro | very nice random number generators, i specifically like SplitMix64 for being very simple, fast, and with a simple 64-bit state, but it has more sophisticated generators available as well |
| rusttype | great for parsing and rasterizing opentype fonts and generating glyph sets for rendering. |