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Why Rust Is the Future of Game Development

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Re: Why Rust Is the Future of Game Development

#111

Post by efficax »

coddle-hark wrote: post #96
jrsj wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this basically saying that you can't have the compiler guaranteeing you aren't including bugs in those optimizations / global variable usage because it's more efficient to just write and then ultimately ship some bugs? To me it seems like this would require a significant adjustment in how certain problems are approached, but the outcome would likely be more effective development as you could eliminate a lot of…

No, it’s saying that you can do clever memory optimizations that the Rust compiler won’t let you do.

you can do all of that in `unsafe` blocks

Re: Why Rust Is the Future of Game Development

#112

Post by kbenson »

lstodd wrote: post #9

Let 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.

> Let me tell you that the future of game development ...

> Does anyone care what language were any particular games that keep being replayed

That seems to be a non-sequitur to me.

What does what people play have to do with what developers are using to create? That's like asking if users care what language serves the web pages at Facebook. The users don't care, but people that make web sites/applications (the developers) might.

Do you know what brand of guitar/piano/keyboard etc your favorite musicians use? I bet other musicians care about that.

Re: Why Rust Is the Future of Game Development

#113

Post by samatman »

Arainach wrote: post #95
zyxzevn wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. The extremely slow compile time and extremely limited data flexibility is blocking rapid development. As an alternative to C++, JAI is more promising in my opinion.

At this point, does anyone seriously expect JAI to ever be released? It's been 6 years.

I think it's more likely than not, yes.

Jonathan Blow has a reputation for taking a rather long time to release something eagerly awaited, and the result being impressive and critically acclaimed.

I hope Jai will be the same way. We'll see what happens.

Re: Why Rust Is the Future of Game Development

#114

Post by nine_k »

jrsj wrote: post #93
dimes wrote: post #47

Having tried writing a game engine in Rust, I can't imagine that Rust would become the future of game development. Lack of safety is a feature in game development, because the optimizations required are typically unorthodox and a super strict language slows development down. Additionally, object ownership can be unclear in a game development setting, which typically makes use of global variables for state. The benefi…

Isn't this basically saying that you can't have the compiler guaranteeing you aren't including bugs in those optimizations / global variable usage because it's more efficient to just write and then ultimately ship some bugs? To me it seems like this would require a significant adjustment in how certain problems are approached, but the outcome would likely be more effective development as you could eliminate a lot of…

Unfortunately, Rust has limitation on what it can prove to be safe using the ownership and lifetimes approach. One of the simplest things which can't safely be done in Rust is a doubly-linked list.

I'm certain that Rust will help some parts of game development a lot, but I'm also certain that game developers sometimes use tricks safety of which cannot be proven by Rust's type system.

Re: Why Rust Is the Future of Game Development

#115

Post by andrewmcwatters »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #107
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #34

This article doesn't actually talk about "Why Rust Is the Future of Game Development." You could have taken out the game development piece, and it still doesn't talk about "Why Rust Is the Future of Development," more than talking about Rust features themselves. I should be able to complete the sentence, "Rust is the future of game development because...," but I can't in any meaningful way. Here are the highlights of…

> It may come as a surprise, but you basically have to bake networking into the engine. It's not easy as an afterthought. Rust doesn't help with this. In fact, multiplayer and all its challenges have nothing to do with Rust. I think multiplayer is an area where you'd want "fearless concurrency". Rust could do well here.

Not really, a tremendous amount of game code doesn't benefit from multithreading. So, this also doesn't have anything to do with Rust.

A better argument might be Rust and Vulcan, though. Even still, you can get very far with just using OpenGL.

Re: Why Rust Is the Future of Game Development

#116

Post by samatman »

gtaylor wrote: post #67
dimes wrote: post #47

Having tried writing a game engine in Rust, I can't imagine that Rust would become the future of game development. Lack of safety is a feature in game development, because the optimizations required are typically unorthodox and a super strict language slows development down. Additionally, object ownership can be unclear in a game development setting, which typically makes use of global variables for state. The benefi…

What makes games more likely to lean on global state than other kinds of applications?

The main problem which global state introduces, is making the bad assumption that there will only be one example of a given sort of data.

In games, that's a safe assumption for many parts of the system, since you're definitely only going to be running one instance of the game world at a time. So making that state private just means you have to pass around references to it on the stack, and keep track of what you're doing.

Re: Why Rust Is the Future of Game Development

#117

Post by cylon13 »

whateveracct wrote: post #33

Personally, I'm betting on Haskell - for indie dev in particular where I want to manage huge amounts of complexity as an individual. This is partially because I've been programming Haskell professionally for 5+ years so I'm over the learning curve and well into the realm of efficiency gains. The GHC RTS is akin to the Lua layer and handles all the high-level logic. For storage and compute-intensive things, we can dro…

One of the problems with Haskell for game development is, because of the novelty of lazy evaluation, it's very difficult to learn what causes space leaks, and it's difficult to learn how to debug them. If you're already an expert in Haskell this might not seem like a big deal, but it certainly makes adoption a lot harder.

Another related issue is the level of abstraction is so high that it makes it harder to be extremely optimal with memory usage and access, which is something game developers love doing, even sometimes when they don't strictly have to.

I love programming in Haskell, but I'm highly suspect that it will ever be a widely used game programming language. It's very good at expressing computations in the abstract at the expense of being good at telling a physical computer exactly what to do. Game programmers tend to prefer languages that fall in the latter category in my experience.

Re: Why Rust Is the Future of Game Development

#118

Post by jokoon »

Sorry, but the learning curve of a programming language matters a lot. It's already hard enough for people to read and write code, so to learn another hard language like rust is not something you do lightly.

Rust is a cool language, but it's a cool tool, nothing more. I'd rather see the ownership process implemented in some C/C++ dialect. I'm not entirely sure, but I think that C++ concepts, in a way, have the same goals than ownership.

Safety doesn't always matter. It matters for a company like Mozilla and anything that's network/system related, that's for sure, but for games, I'm not so sure.

Also, statically typed languages that compiles to machine code are a niche now, new languages in that area don't really matter. You either have kernel code, or interpreted languages. A big quantity of C/C++ userspace code is fossilized code. Computers are quite fast for a lot of interpreted languages.

Re: Why Rust Is the Future of Game Development

#119

Post by Iwan-Zotow »

hvasilev wrote: post #43

Two weeks ago Rust was the future of embedded systems (it is not) and now it is the future of Game Development (it is not). I'm starting to think that people's opinion shouldn't be taken seriously unless they have like at least 20 years of experience in a particular field.

Rust is the future of humanity!

Re: Why Rust Is the Future of Game Development

#120

Post by steveklabnik »

nine_k wrote: post #114
jrsj wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this basically saying that you can't have the compiler guaranteeing you aren't including bugs in those optimizations / global variable usage because it's more efficient to just write and then ultimately ship some bugs? To me it seems like this would require a significant adjustment in how certain problems are approached, but the outcome would likely be more effective development as you could eliminate a lot of…

Unfortunately, Rust has limitation on what it can prove to be safe using the ownership and lifetimes approach. One of the simplest things which can't safely be done in Rust is a doubly-linked list. I'm certain that Rust will help some parts of game development a lot, but I'm also certain that game developers sometimes use tricks safety of which cannot be proven by Rust's type system.

You can do these things safely, you just can't do them safely and efficiently at the same time. You could do a doubly linked list with reference counting, and it would be in safe code, it just wouldn't be classic implementation you'd be imagining, and not as efficient.
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