Are you one of the nerds, who likes to develop your own game, fancy graphics or any aspect that comes with that or would you do your first steps with the young programming language Rust, which unites speed of C/C++ with memory- and thread-safety?

Why not combining both aspects to have some fun learning new things?

Environment

Just to be even more nerdy, I show you a way to do that all within the Windows Subsystem for Linux and it’s brand new graphical extension under Windows 11. At the moment of writing it’s still in preview, so be aware of some shortcomings.

Preconditions

  • Microsoft Windows 11
  • Enabled CPU virtualisation

Setup Linux in WSL2

Install WSL2

If you havn’t installed WSL2 yet, follow the manual here

In short:

  1. Open a windows terminal with administrator privilegies Windows Terminal on Github

  2. Run

    wsl --install

    and follow the instructions.

Configure Linux in WSL2

  1. Open your Ubuntu Linux within WSL2

  2. Install rust with

    curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
rustup update
rustup component add rls rust-analysis rust-src

    Remarks: The Ubuntu 20.04 packages from repository are missing libs for code completion in VS Code.

    1. If you are using fish shell

      • Create/edit file: ~/.config/fish/conf.d/myconfig.fish

      • Add

        if status --is-login
  set -gx PATH $PATH ~/.cargo/bin $PATH
end

  3. Install bevy linux dependencies with

    sudo apt install g++ pkg-config libx11-dev libasound2-dev libudev-dev libwayland-dev libxkbcommon-dev mesa-vulkan-drivers

    Some more information can be found here

  4. Install git

    sudo apt install git

Bevy (a slim and fast Rust game engine)

  1. Clone the Bevy repo:

    git clone https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy

  2. Try the examples in the examples folder

    cargo run --example breakout

Be aware, that the setup and use of the graphical WSL for Linux GUI applications isn’t hardware accelerated by default and not free of errors at the time of writing. But hey, Microsoft is working on it hard. More infos about it here. With special drivers, you can already check that out, too.

Have fun

This is a very good startpoint to learn rust by playing around with a game engine. Let me know about your progress with that.

Please leave a comment if something is wrong or missing. Or if you have any questions.

Have fun!

If you like, buy me a coffee

ko-fi

freakyDude