[cdelsolar]

I am working on a translation of a game engine from Go to C with another coder. One of our end goals is to make it easily available via WASM in a web browser.

As to why work in C - it’s incredibly fast, it feels very powerful as long as we manage memory correctly. We use fsanitize, which is an amazing library that can find memory leaks, buffer overruns, etc etc and run it on all unit tests. I think fsanitize is essential to have in your tool belt if you’re doing any C programming at all.

A pretty direct translation from Go to C resulted in about a 125% speed up (ie the C code was 25% faster) and this was already very optimized Go code with no allocations. From Go to WASM the results were disappointing to say the least - WASM was about 32% the speed of Go and not at all easy to multithread (and a gigantic file). From C to WASM I got a much better 79% of native speed - would have wanted a little bit more, but this is much more doable, and we haven’t begun to optimize some parts of this engine yet. And Emscripten seems to have very good pthread support, which I will try soon.