I haven't worked in the games industry so please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't game development culture one of rushing crude hacks out the door at the last minute? Rust seems like a poor 'culture fit' in this regard.
Why Rust Is the Future of Game Development
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Re: Why Rust Is the Future of Game Development
#12Let me tell you that the future of game development is in developing games, and any particular language has nothing to do with it. Does anyone care what language were any particular games that keep being replayed or remembered fondly? No. Never.
I agree with you, but there are plenty of poorly educated gamers who think that 'developed in Unity' or Gamemaker means the game can't possibly be good. (All evidence to the contrary.)
Re: Why Rust Is the Future of Game Development
#13For 95% of all game developer the future is a engine like Unreal or Unity and your scripting language of choice.
The rest, triple A titles and engine developers may chose something else, but the inertia of C/C++ will make that a very long process.
Re: Why Rust Is the Future of Game Development
#14> Way back around 2010, Mozilla was frustrated by the state of development in Firefox, a massive software project written mostly in C++. Despite best practices > Even so, manual memory manipulation is easy to get wrong, Even predating C++11, you should not have been doing manual memory management. I don’t think Mozilla was following best practices. IIRC, there were pointers everywhere. Even before C++11 best practice…
So what in the language prevented them from doing it that way? What in the community ensured they didn't do it that way? Firefox is open source, and yet it still happened.
"Best practices" is such a red herring. Best practices = don't write bugs, too; yet there are bugs. You can't evaluate a language in theory and ignore what happens in practice any more than you can with any other thing in life. It's the UX, does it do what users expect it to do, and is that the lowest friction path possible to achieve the goal. "You're not following best practices" is basically "you're holding it wrong". While arguably true, it is an attempt to excuse a bad design decision or impedance mismatch.
Re: Why Rust Is the Future of Game Development
#15I think Rust would eat into C++ more than C#. Microsoft is pushing C# and the tooling fairly hard right now.
Performance is pretty good and even though Rust seems like a rising star, it won't reach C# levels of tooling for quite some time.
I don't think the population of studios that chose C#'s performance and convenience over C++ but would now choose Rust is all that large.
But hey, lets start talking about bindings. We could be changing all these C#/C++ engines into C#/Rust engines.
Re: Why Rust Is the Future of Game Development
#16The future of Game Development is about democratization of tools. With tools like Unity, GameMaker, and RPG maker it has become easier and easier for anyone to make a game. While Rust might be a good foundation for some performance critical code, I'd hardly say it's the "Future of Game Development".
Already, games use tools like Blueprints in Unreal to make games with limited to no coding experience, and I expect those tools will continue to get better and better over time.
Re: Why Rust Is the Future of Game Development
#17Let me tell you that most C++ game dev never heard of Rust, so imagine how long it's going to take for Rust to be something usable in that domain? Right now in the real world of AAA games it is nowhere, it's not even a consideration so calling it "Rust Is the Future of Game Development" right ... For those who don't work in games, the tech there move very slowly, it's not your typical SV "let's use the latest fun and…
> Let me tell you that most C++ game dev never heard of Rust
Why would you say that? I have no reason to believe it. C++ and Rust discussions frequently overlap so it's unlikely anyone who uses C++ hasn't heard of it. Game developers, in particular, are exposed to a larger segment of programming languages simply out of necessity. Searching for solutions or functionality will usually lead to esoteric options and the ever-present gamedev talks about how language X solves a portion of your gamedev woes.
Re: Why Rust Is the Future of Game Development
#18I think a number of companies, like mine, are working with Rust internally. But articles like these don’t provide any insight into those efforts, which are kept private.
Game development at large-scale is a mix of systems programming of the kind that Rust excels at and gameplay logic programming which has loose performance requirements and may be written by people who are not primarily coders. So you see a lot of codebases split between two languages, like a C++ core with Lua bindings or something like that.
If we see Rust adoption here I’m expecting it to be from a kind of skunkworks inside the company replacing specific, carefully-chosen systems with Rust code. At my company, that’s how it’s done, and it’s a very slow process. (I don’t work in the game industry, so all I hear is rumors from people that used to work in the game industry.)
Re: Why Rust Is the Future of Game Development
#19Let me tell you that most C++ game dev never heard of Rust, so imagine how long it's going to take for Rust to be something usable in that domain? Right now in the real world of AAA games it is nowhere, it's not even a consideration so calling it "Rust Is the Future of Game Development" right ... For those who don't work in games, the tech there move very slowly, it's not your typical SV "let's use the latest fun and…
> Let me tell you that most C++ game dev never heard of Rust Why would you say that? I have no reason to believe it. C++ and Rust discussions frequently overlap so it's unlikely anyone who uses C++ hasn't heard of it. Game developers, in particular, are exposed to a larger segment of programming languages simply out of necessity. Searching for solutions or functionality will usually lead to esoteric options and the e…
If you count Unreal engine game devs then I could see it being true. Many devs script with blueprints or work on art or sound or level design etc. Not every Unreal dev codes with C++ daily.
Re: Why Rust Is the Future of Game Development
#20Let me tell you that the future of game development is in developing games, and any particular language has nothing to do with it. Does anyone care what language were any particular games that keep being replayed or remembered fondly? No. Never.
I agree with you, but there are plenty of poorly educated gamers who think that 'developed in Unity' or Gamemaker means the game can't possibly be good. (All evidence to the contrary.)
I have heard complaints about Unity games performing badly, which, for a lot of games, is actually the case.