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Comment by Rapzid | Hacker News Reader

I've been diving into the engine development scene this week. Lots of cool activity going on.

There is a PR shaping up to produce "libgodot"; Godot as a shared lib for embedding in other code. Users reporting use cases and what they are currently doing with that:

* embedding in .net to flip that script

* embedding in Blender so assets can be viewed in engine and a tighter integration created

* VR applications

* Miguel de Icaza's(yes that one!) SwiftGodotKit

* Image export, a UI system, 3d viewport, asset conversion automation, etc.

Really cool stuff!

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Do you have a link to that PR? I am actually very interested in something like that.

Yes it's here: https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/72883 .

Looks like it lost a little momentum in the past few weeks but it's working for people and there is a path forward to getting accepted by maintainers. It's also on the DotNet contributors meeting agenda for tomorrow..

There are many mentions of C# there, but it is just a C library that can be embedded without involving C#, right?

Yes, I think someone who first started pushing for it was interested in embedding it in their C# app as the entry.

But it's just an .so that can be used in any app through the C ABI I gather.

I don't know about C# but I do know Java can use C code through the Java Native Interface. I wouldn't be surprised if .NET and Mono have something similar.

Golang has this as well and can also be compiled to a .so if desired.

Oooh I wonder if this libgodot would also allow me to work with Kotlin/Native. I've tried getting into Godot, but C# felt a bit... dated compared to Kotlin.

Don't even get me started on GDScript.

I imagine so. Should also be possible to generate bindings from the ClassDb json in a similar way to how it's done in C#. I'm not super familiar with it but it's all moving to the GDExtension stuff.

GDExtension appears to be quite the bottleneck though. https://sampruden.github.io/posts/godot-is-not-the-new-unity...

In a few places. Author has communicated with the devs and they seem receptive to addressing the issues with the usual caveats that it doesn't break anything.

Not familiar with Kotlin, what are the features you were missing when using C#?

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