// the find
KaijuEngine/kaiju
General purpose 3D and 2D game engine using Go (golang) and Vulkan with built in editor
Kaiju is a 2D/3D game engine written in Go on top of Vulkan, with a built-in editor that runs as a game inside the engine itself. It targets developers who want Unity/Godot-style tooling but with Go as the scripting and extension language instead of C# or GDScript. Still under active development — the engine is usable but the editor is explicitly not production-ready.
The performance numbers are genuinely interesting: the author benchmarks 5,400 FPS on a scene that Unity runs at 1,600 FPS, and claims near-zero net heap allocation during gameplay, which is a real achievement for a GC language. The editor-as-game architecture is a clean decision — it means the UI system gets stress-tested constantly and the same rendering path runs everywhere. The custom retained-mode UI with optional HTML/CSS markup is a pragmatic middle ground: you can write layouts in HTML for tooling but drop to the native system when you need speed. Build tags are used to strip editor code from game builds rather than relying on runtime feature flags, which is the right call.
The dependency chain is non-trivial: Vulkan, CGO, a C compiler, and platform libs are all required, and the README's 'just install mingw' note for a missing DLL on Windows is a sign that the build story needs more work. The editor being explicitly not production-ready while the engine claims to be creates an awkward gap — most Go developers who'd reach for this want tooling, not a raw API. There's no scripting story yet (Lua is mentioned as planned), so your game logic is in Go, which means your game is essentially a Go plugin — fine for engine contributors, less fine for non-Go teams or modders. The ecosystem is effectively one person with a Discord, which is a real bus-factor risk for a project you'd build a game on.