As a gamedev i love it, if you bet on JS for games and need "native" packaging then the platform runtimes has been quite a bit hit-or-miss but with V8 as default (or JSC) then it's sane runtimes with a good WebGPU backend (same as in the browsers).

Only thing "missing" is perhaps a companion builder to emulate the C++ API with a WKWebView bundling setup for iOS.

For those reading, if Apple still disallows JIT:ed code, then a WKWebView might still be the best option in terms of pure JS simulation performance even if the WebView might steal some GPU perf.

What's the story/idea on controls (thin DOM emulation for pointerevents,keyboard,etc?), accelerometers, input-fields and fonts.

As much as I like controlling what I render, having good support for font/input-handling and system inputs is a clear plus of using web tech.

Followup comment about Apple disallowing JIT - will need to confirm if JSC is allowed to JIT or only inside of a webview. I was able to get JSC + wgpu-native rendering in an iOS build, but would need to confirm if it can pass app review.

There's 2 other performance things that you can do by controlling the runtime though - add special perf methods (which I did for draco decoding - there is currently one __mystralNativeDecodeDracoAsync API that is non standard), but the docs clearly lay out that you should feature gate it if you're going to use it so you don't break web builds: https://mystralengine.github.io/mystralnative/docs/api/nativ...

The other thing is more experimental - writing an AOT compiler for a subset of Typescript to convert it into C++ then just compile your code ("MystralScript") - this would be similar to Unity's C# AOT compiler and kinda be it's own separate project, but there is some prior work with porffor, AssemblyScript, and Static Hermes here, so it's not completely just a research project.

Hi, thanks! Yeah for controls I'm emulating pointerevents and keydown, keyup from SDL3 inputs & events. The goal is that the same JS that you write for a browser should "just work". It's still very alpha, but I was able to get my own WebGPU game engine running in it & have a sponza example that uses the exact key and pointer events to handle WASD / mouse controls: https://mystraldev.itch.io/sponza-in-webgpu-mystral-engine (the web build there is older, but the downloads for Windows, Mac, and Linux are using Mystral Native - you can clearly tell that it's not Electron by size (even Tauri for Mac didn't support webp inside of the WebGPU context so I couldn't use draco compressed assets w/ webp textures).

I put up a roadmap to get Three.js and Pixi 8 (webgpu renderer) fully working as part of a 1.0.0 release, but there's nothing that my JS engine is doing that is that different than Three.js or Pixi. https://github.com/mystralengine/mystralnative/issues/7

I did have to get Skia for Canvas2d support because I was using it for UI elements inside of the canvas, so right now it's a WebGPU + Canvas2d runtime. Debating if I should also add ANGLE and WebGL bindings as well in v2.0.0 to support a lot of other use cases too. Fonts support is built in as part of the Skia support as well, so that is also covered. WebAudio is another thing that is currently supported, but may need more testing to be fully compatible.