Why not use types directly?

[qm3ster]

But what if newtype good? 🤔

[ten3roberts]

Yes. Newtypes are useful if you need to restrict or enforce some new invariant for a datatype.

However if only using newtypes for type uniqueness in an ECS and having to do Into and From it can become problematic.

The idea behind flex is to enforce the types which are valid components so that you can use a e.g Vec3 for both position and velocity and add them together without having to convert one to the other.

You can still use newtypes and name them as a component, as a bonus, the compiler will enforce that you actually use the correct type when inserting it so that oyu don't accidentally use a &'static str where String was expected.

I am still early in the development of this plugin, and the plan is to allow complex and dynamic components as well.