I really wish the Rust gamedev community could take this opportunity to revisit the possibility of transitioning cgmath to nalgebra, as @brendanzab has attempted before.

nalgebra has by far the best chance at longevity out of any known Rust math library.

@sebcrozet’s Patreon campaign is edging ever closer to a monthly patronage that’ll support a steady part-time commitment on his part.

No other Rust physics library comes close to nphysics. If Rust gamedev takes off there’ll be plenty of commercial interest in such a library, which could support a whole team of maintainers.

It has excellent documentation

It has a forum that’s well tended to, further adding to the public knowledgebase.

If the community can’t come up with a way to standardise on nalgebra I strongly suspect we’ll be back here in a year from now with another call for cgmath maintainers. Thanks to nphysics, nalgebra will see increasing adoption, but the community appears to favour cgmath as far as plain math libraries go.

Looking at nalgebra’s progress over time @sebcrozet has made a lot of changes as a result of constructive feedback. The main problem appears to be a lack of feedback from the community. Understandably so, because it’s easier to just switch to cgmath and not make a fuss. But I think if the Rust gamedevers were more outspoken about why they prefer cgmath over nalgebra it’d be a net gain for everyone.

@icefoxen highlighted some noteworthy quirks in the nalgebra dev experience in his Ludum Dare post mortem. We need more use case stories like these.