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Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

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Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#321

Post by mr_00ff00 »

dario_od wrote: post #242
bdw5204 wrote: post #24

My impression of Rust is that it's a very opinionated language that wants everybody to program in a specific way that emphasizes memory safety above everything. That's a good idea, I think, for the systems programming use cases that it was intended for. I don't see that as a particularly useful thing to value for game development. The part in the article about the Rust borrow checker constantly forcing refactors soun…

You more or less described Zig

Sort of, although Zig certainly pushes itself towards the embedded world. I have tried Zig a bit and like it a lot, and I am sure it would be better for game dev than Rust, but I don't want to pass allocators around all day to all the objects in my game.

Go without GC is more like a Go and Zig baby.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#322

Post by emseetech »

hi-v-rocknroll wrote: post #253
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,…

As a non-game dev who uses Rust and Elixir, Rust wouldn't be my first pick for a large gamedev studio for multiple reasons. As for alternatives worth evaluating: Crystal, Cython (compiled Python), or Nim could result in increased gamedev productivity over C++ or C#. Maybe even Go because the iteration and compile times are very fast, and the learning curve is very low.

| Go because the iteration and compile times are very fast

Safety is important and for certain applications, Rust is unrivaled.

But for games, like web apps, where time to market and innovation can be just as if not more important than being free of runtime errors, Go is more suited to rapid development than Rust on compile times alone.

Of course, the libraries and support for both aren't quite there yet, so at this point neither is well suited to game dev.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#323

Post by bogwog »

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/…

That game (currently) has 88% positive reviews on steam and a 77 metacritic score with over 15.5k people playing the game right now (according to steamcharts.com)

Thats a lot of happy customers.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#324

Post by [deleted] »

bdw5204 wrote: post #24

My impression of Rust is that it's a very opinionated language that wants everybody to program in a specific way that emphasizes memory safety above everything. That's a good idea, I think, for the systems programming use cases that it was intended for. I don't see that as a particularly useful thing to value for game development. The part in the article about the Rust borrow checker constantly forcing refactors soun…

[deleted]

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#325

Post by mirekrusin »

hot_gril wrote: post #168
mirekrusin wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advice should be - you should do what you like and try to align it with your client (employer) - otherwise you'll burnout rather quickly.

It's not easy to find an employer that'll agree with your preferences. I chose to find fun and value in the way I collaborate and reach end goals, not the tools. If the tooling in my dept sucks, I just treat it like a challenge and deal with it.

Healthy.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#326

Post by pcwalton »

pavlov wrote: post #314
meheleventyone wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree the adoption of C++ was more about Moore's law than ecosystem, although having compilers that were beginning to not be completely rubbish also helped.

Also C++ could be adopted incrementally by C developers. You could use it as “C with classes”, or just use operator overloading to make vector math more tolerable, or whatever subset that you happened to like. So there’s really three forces at play in making C++ the standard: 1) The Microsoft ecosystem. They literally stopped supporting C by not adopting the C99 standard in their compiler. If you wanted any modern co…

I'd say Rust does have that big ticket ecosystem push. Microsoft has been embracing Rust lately, with things like official Windows bindings [1].

The bigger problem is just inertia: large game engines are enormous.

[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#327

Post by duped »

zamalek wrote: post #269
duped wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The "async" system is optimized for someone who needs to run a very large web server, Even there it's very problematic at scale unless you know what you're doing. async/await isn't zero cost, regardless of what people will tell you.

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

I disagree with this, you're probably not paying much (if at all) in latency or throughput for better scaling.

What you're paying for with async/await is a state machine that describes the concurrent task, but that state machine can be incredibly wasteful in size due to the design of futures and the desugaring pass that converts async/await into the state machine.

That's why I said it's not "zero cost" in the loosest definition of the phrase - you can write a better implementation by hand.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#329

Post by meheleventyone »

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…

IMO one language can sidetrack you more than another. It might not be the main problem but a language that gets in the way for your usecase causes you to focus on the wrong problem. Making a good game is really hard and really needs you to focus outside the tech.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#330

Post by tkz1312 »

akavi wrote: post #70
BoorishBears wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that just Swift/Kotlin?

It's any of: Rust + (garbage collector) Swift + (cross platform support) Kotlin + (proper pattern matching) Unfortunately, none quite hit that central sweet spot, IMO

Roc is looking very promising IMO
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