Mach project goals

This page covers more broad project goals that apply to all Mach projects, code, standalone libraries, etc.

Engine goals

See this page.

Zero-fuss installation

All too often we see people get a sudden burst of inspiration: "I'm going to finally start my game/app this weekend!" only to see them utlimately get bogged down by setting up their dev environment, ending their weekend with "well.. at least I got the hello world running" - there is no greater drain on human inspiration.

This is why Mach focuses so heavily on zero-fuss installation: you only need Zig, Git, and Curl to use Mach. Nothing else. No more `apt-get install` lists. No more cmake/ninja/dependency-hell.

Mach is able to achieve this by doing the heavy lifting of compiling C/C++ dependencies by source for you, using Zig as the C/C++ compiler. We build GLFW, Google Chrome’s WebGPU implementation, and much more using just Zig as a C/C++ compiler and avoid make/cmake/ninja/etc by taking on the hard work of using Zig as the build system too.

In some cases building from source can take a few minutes (like building Google Chrome’s WebGPU implementation) and we don’t want you to have to wait, so we provide binaries by default in that specific case which are used when you execute zig build. We understand the importance of 100% from-source builds, however, and so we make them possible at the flip of a switch DAWN_FROM_SOURCE=true zig build

Seamless cross-compilation

At the flip of a switch it is possible to cross-compile to nearly any target:

$ zig build -Dtarget=x86_64-windows
$ zig build -Dtarget=x86_64-linux-gnu
$ zig build -Dtarget=x86_64-macos
$ zig build -Dtarget=aarch64-macos

This is made possible in a few ways:

1. Zig acts as a C/C++ compiler capable of cross-compilation, shipping libc for each platform.
2. On Linux targets, Zig ships out-of-the-box with support for targetting any version of glibc removing the need for “that outdated Debian box we must build on”
3. Mach itself provides system SDKs which include additional headers and dynamic libraries used for the cross-compilation build process:
   1. Updated DirectX 12 headers (and prior versions)
   2. X11/xcb/Wayland headers
   3. OpenGL and Vulkan headers
   4. Generated Wayland protocol sources
   5. macOS XCode SDK frameworks/headers

Through this, we are able to effectively fetch the required dependencies/headers in Mach’s build.zig files and as a result zig build is able to download all the dependencies needed to build your application.

These dependencies are generally compile-time only, i.e. we use them to link to a dynamic library, but our binaries are not shipped with the application only used for linking. We rely on a very small set of system dependencies effectively guaranteed to be present on any of our supported targets, and all other dependencies are built from source.

See also our platform support.