hckrnws

Hi HN, I've been building Mystral Native — a lightweight native runtime that lets you write games in JavaScript/TypeScript using standard Web APIs (WebGPU, Canvas 2D, Web Audio, fetch) and run them as standalone desktop apps. Think "Electron for games" but without Chromium. Or a JS runtime like Node, Deno, or Bun but optimized for WebGPU (and bundling a window / event system using SDL3).

Why: I originally started by starting a new game engine in WebGPU, and I loved the iteration loop of writing Typescript & instantly seeing the changes in the browser with hot reloading. After getting something working and shipping a demo, I realized that shipping a whole browser doesn't really work if I also want the same codebase to work on mobile. Sure, I could use a webview, but that's not always a good or consistent experience for users - there are nuances with Safari on iOS supporting WebGPU, but not the same features that Chrome does on desktop. What I really wanted was a WebGPU runtime that is consistent & works on any platform. I was inspired by deno's --unsafe-webgpu flag, but I realized that deno probably wouldn't be a good fit long term because it doesn't support iOS or Android & doesn't bundle a window / event system (they have "bring your own window", but that means writing a lot of custom code for events, dealing with windowing, not to mention more specific things like implementing a WebAudio shim, etc.). So that got me down the path of building a native runtime specifically for games & that's Mystral Native.

So now with Mystral Native, I can have the same developer experience (write JS, use shaders in WGSL, call requestAnimationFrame) but get a real native binary I can ship to players on any platform without requiring a webview or a browser. No 200MB Chromium runtime, no CEF overhead, just the game code and a ~25MB runtime.

What it does: - Full WebGPU via Dawn (Chrome's implementation) or wgpu-native (Rust) - Native window & events via SDL3 - Canvas 2D support (Skia), Web Audio (SDL3), fetch (file/http/https) - V8 for JS (same engine as Chrome/Node), also supports QuickJS and JSC - ES modules, TypeScript via SWC - Compile to single binary (think "pkg"): `mystral compile game.js --include assets -o my-game` - macOS .app bundles with code signing, Linux/Windows standalone executables - Embedding API for iOS and Android (JSC/QuickJS + wgpu-native)

It's early alpha — the core rendering path works well & I've tested on Mac, Linux (Ubuntu 24.04), and Windows 11, and some custom builds for iOS & Android to validate that they can work, but there's plenty to improve. Would love to get some feedback and see where it can go!

MIT licensed.

Repo: https://github.com/mystralengine/mystralnative

Docs: https://mystralengine.github.io/mystralnative/