Choosing a Language

In many fields of programming, the choice of language is quite open... even interpreted languages are often acceptable!

But with voxels? Let's do a quick exercise, shall we...

The Scaling Problem

1. Grab a calculator (we ain't monsters here)!
2. Think of how far into the distance you want to 'see', in meters/voxels.
3. Type that number into the calculator.
4. Double the number once.
5. Multiply the number, by itself, twice.
6. Look at the result.
7. Try this again, from step 2, with some other numbers...

Unless you keep the range of the active volume very small (on the order of 16³ to 256³), you will quickly realize that there is a scaling problem: Increasing the size of the volume will consume cubically more and more memory, making computations horrendously expensive.

Requirements for performant Voxels

As such, there are some rather strong requirements when choosing a language:

1. Tightly packing data, via structs and continuous arrays.
2. Processing large arrays/lists of numbers at bare-metal speed.
3. Creation of complex, nested, but performant, data-structures.
4. No copying or cloning of data unless requested.
5. Access to graphics hardware acceleration.
6. Multithreading.

This effectively cuts out all languages that are interpreted¹ instead of compiled; unless you are fine with a very small volume size, using these languages is not recommended for anything but higher level scripts.

While Chunking and various acceleration structures go a long way to alleviate the issues posed by interpreted and JIT'd languages, you will eventually need the ability to manage memory on both fine and large scales.

Your Choices

Unfortunately, all this restricts your choices to system-level languages such as C++, Rust, Zig, Go and (on the JIT side) C# 7.2+.

For this guide we will be using basic Rust; you do not need to know how lifetimes work, for now.

Next

Storing Voxels In Memory!