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Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

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Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#291

Post by hi-v-rocknroll »

popcar2 wrote: post #46

> Rust gamedev ecosystem lives on hype I've been saying this for years. I've tried to get into Rust multiple times the past few years and one of the things I've tried was gamedev with Rust (specifically the library ggez when it was still being worked on, and a little bit of Bevy). I admittedly never got far, but I gave it a solid shot. My experience was instantly terrible. Slow compile times and iterations, huge pack…

Rust ain't Go but anything Go has can be used as an argument that Rust should try to do better in certain areas. ;)

Perhaps learn another language like Haskell, Swift, or Kotlin before Rust.

Get cargo-bloat, cargo-cache, and cargo-outdated.

Setup a memcache server and use sccache to accelerate Rust, C, and C++ compilations. It's not 100% but it's pretty awesome for things compiled at a stable build location.

Just like any platform, avoid dependencies wherever possible and use minimal crate features. Some Rust crates have an npm-like problem of dragging in zillions of dependencies.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#292

Post by chaosprint »

I've worked on Ambient Engine and now on the Bevy engine. I totally agree with these points, very valuable.

I only make some comments from my professional (audio) perspective:

We need the highlight author's affirmation of cli. Rust's tui (ratatui) is great. I used it to make Glicol-cli [1]. If you are a Linux user, you are welcome to test the music production of the code.

Speaking of game audio, I actually think rust is perfect for audio. I have also continued to develop Glicol [2] recently, and my recent goal (starting tomorrow) is the bevy_glicol plug-in. I want to solve bevy's audio problem on the browser.

All in all, even though I've had my share of pain with ecs, I still think rust is very valuable for game and app development, maybe not multiplayer AAA, maybe practical apps.

[1] https://github.com/glicol/glicol-cli

[2] https://github.com/chaosprint/glicol

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#293

Post by pcwalton »

popcar2 wrote: post #46

> Rust gamedev ecosystem lives on hype I've been saying this for years. I've tried to get into Rust multiple times the past few years and one of the things I've tried was gamedev with Rust (specifically the library ggez when it was still being worked on, and a little bit of Bevy). I admittedly never got far, but I gave it a solid shot. My experience was instantly terrible. Slow compile times and iterations, huge pack…

> And my other biggest problem is that they keep painting other non-Rust things as being fundamentally flawed for not being Rust. "It's not memory safe" is the biggest one thrown around, but when was the last time memory safety was actually a big problem in games? Unity uses C# which is garbage collected, Godot uses its own scripting language which makes it nigh impossible to leak memory, Unreal AFAIK has its own tools that makes memory management trivial. Rust game development feels like a solution looking for a problem to fix.

Memory safety may or may not be important in games, but the ability of engines like Bevy to analyze system dependencies and automatically scale to multiple CPUs is a big deal. Job queuing systems have been popular in gamedev for a very long time, and Rust's insistence on explicit declaration of mutability is a big part of the reason that "just works" in Bevy.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#294

Post by mrkeen »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #139
dmitrygr wrote: post #16

The Rust community is one of the top arguments against rust. I've never before been so condescended to as when attempting to ask questions there. Their lack of care for perf also drives me up a wall. Anytime they propose adding an extra layer of indirection to get around the borrow checker, I have to explain yet again that with the way modern CPUs work, extra layers of indirection have serious cache-related perf cost…

> when attempting to ask questions there Could you please give an indication of which venues you've encountered this kind of condescension in? I don't tend to see this in the spaces I frequent, but I know it is happening, and I wish it weren't. We try, sometimes, to provide some official messaging discouraging this kind of condescension, but perhaps there's something more we can do.

I think I found it:

>> Their lack of care for perf

>> I have to explain yet again

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#295

Post by jvanderbot »

littlestymaar wrote: post #282
zamalek wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. Async/await typically improves headroom (scalability) at the cost of latency and throughput. It may also make code easier to reason about.

> at the cost of latency and throughput. Compared to what? Doing epoll manually?

Threading, probably.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#296

Post by delfinom »

hot_gril wrote: post #268
kibwen wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd expected some AAA title to be written in Rust by now. I'm disinclined to believe that any AAA game will be written in Rust (one is free to insert "because Rust's gamedev ecosystem is immature" or "because AAA game development is increasingly conservative and risk-averse" at their discretion), yet I'm curious what led you to believe this. C++ became available in 1985, and didn't become popular for gamedev until…

Exactly, it's all about the ecosystem and very little about the language features

Kind of both in my opinion. But rust is bringing nothing to the table that games need.

At best rust fixes crash bugs and not the usual logic and rendering bugs that are far more involved and plague users more often.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#297

Post by lionkor »

mrkeen wrote: post #247
stephc_int13 wrote: post #219

As a game developer for about two decades, I've never considered Rust to be a good programming language choice. My priorities are reasonable performances and the fastest iteration time possible. Gameplay code should be flexible, we have tons and tons of edge cases _by design_ because this is the best way to create interesting games. Compilation time is very important, but also a flexible enough programming structure,…

> My priorities are reasonable performances and the fastest iteration time possible. I bought Mount & Blade II Bannerlord in 2020-03-30. I love it to death, but come on... // 2024-02-01 $ curl https://www.taleworlds.com/en/News/552 | grep "Fixed a crash that" | wc -l 29 // 2023-12-21 $ curl https://www.taleworlds.com/en/News/549 | grep "Fixed a crash that" | wc -l 6 // 2023-12-14 $ curl https://www.taleworlds.com/en/…

With Rust and the exact time iteration times, management and deadlines, you end up with the same amount, just theyre panic!() instead. Thats an improvement, sure, but its fighting a symptom.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#298

Post by fuzztester »

indigoabstract wrote: post #186

I've become wary of commenting on articles that mention the pros and cons of various languages, but I still find it strange that so many people are so strongly focused on what their favourite language can do (usually better than others), instead of the project they're working on. When it should be the other way around. The joke he mentioned about having 50 engines written but only 5 games certainly rings true and I d…

Yep.

Bikeshedding, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, and https://xkcd.com/927/ are some ways of loosely describing what you said.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_many_angels_can_dance_on...

>but I still find it strange that so many people are so strongly focused on what their favourite language can do (usually better than others), instead of the project they're working on.

Yes, if they are so convinced of that, why are they not back in the office or at home, working busy as a beaver on their project, using that great programming language, the benefits of which they extol?

Smells fishy to me.

Oops.

Do people see what I did there? ;)

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#299

Post by Xeamek »

pcwalton wrote: post #239

As someone who's become a core contributor to Bevy lately, while also doing contract work in Unity on the side, I obviously disagree with the idea that Rust isn't up to the task of game dev. The grass isn't greener on the Unity side, with a mountain of technical debt holding the engine back. (They're still using Boehm GC in 2024!) Bevy is a breath of fresh air just because it's relatively new and free of legacy. Usin…

I mean, if you agree that the ideal for bevy would be lua integration, you are kinda agree with the author that Rust itself is suboptimal (at least in layer of game scropting), don't You?

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#300

Post by vacuity »

attheicearcade wrote: post #114

Absolutely agree with the comments on ECS and Bevy in particular. I tried getting to grips with it for some time, doing things the Bevy way, and it just felt like a big step backwards because it’s not suitable for most things. The renderer was really slow at the time too, although I imagine that has improved. Switched to plain rust + vulkan (via ash) + dear imgui and haven’t looked back.

Some of those issues with Bevy might have more to do with its immaturity. It still needs at least a few years to be a solid choice for all sorts of games, in my opinion. I do think the hype should be toned down; people shouldn't feel pressured to worship Bevy or Rust or whatever is the hot new thing.
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