Getting started

Install raylib

Every port links against a system raylib 6.0 or newer, and none of them bundle it.

brew install raylib                   # macOS
sudo pacman -S raylib                 # Arch, and your distro's equivalent

Pick a port and run it

babashka is the fastest to get on screen, because it has no build step at all.

cd helitorus/helitorus-babashka && bb helitorus

Drag to turn, wheel to zoom, LEFT and RIGHT change the winding count, UP and DOWN the resolution.

For the other game:

cd mesh-instancing/mesh-instancing-babashka && bb mesh

From the repository root, bb ports lists every port and whether it is built, and bb play <id> runs one by name.

bb ports
bb play helitorus/jolt

Run it with nobody at the keyboard

Every port takes the same shape of arguments, which is what makes the whole repo scriptable.

bb helitorus 10                  # quit after ten seconds of game time
bb helitorus 3 out.png 40        # quit after three, capture frame 40
bb helitorus 3 out.png 40 900    # the same, at resolution 900

mesh-instancing takes an instance count and a mode in the last two slots:

bb mesh 5 out.png 40 2000        # 2000 cubes, matrices built once
bb mesh 5 out.png 40 2000 spin   # 2000 cubes, rebuilt every frame

The deadline counts game time, summed from the clamped per-frame dt, rather than wall time. That matters for any runtime that pays a one-off cost before the first frame, which would otherwise spend its whole budget there and quit looking like a program that does not work.

The sweeps

From the root, across every port at once:

bb check-all      # load or compile all of them, the fast gate
bb shot-all       # run each for a few seconds and capture a PNG
bb doctor-all     # which toolchain is missing where

Per-runtime prerequisites

babashka needs bb 1.13.220, because these use the babashka.ffi built into bb. That namespace is present in 1.13.220 and absent in 1.12.212, both checked, so anything between the two is untested.

Clojure needs a JDK 22 or newer, because coffi sits on Panama. Three JVM flags are load-bearing and deps.edn sets all three.

jank needs jank and a Leiningen. The first run compiles raylib-sys natively and takes a few minutes. Every lein invocation needs --disable-sandbox on macOS, which has no bwrap; without it the build aborts with an error that never mentions jank.

jolt needs jolt 0.8.0 or newer. The raylib bindings come from jlt-commons/raylib-jlt, pinned by sha.

None of the four needs any of the others.

If you are going to quote a number

Read reading-the-numbers.md first. For jank in particular, measure the -O3 binary rather than lein run:

cd helitorus/helitorus-jank && bb release && bb run-release