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Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

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Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#711

Post by emmelaich »

lumost wrote: post #615
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…

I sometimes wonder if the problem with rust is that we have not yet had a major set of projects which drive solutions to common dev problems. Go had google driving adoption, which in turn drove open source efforts. The language had to remain grounded to not interfere with the doing of building back-end services. Rust had mozilla/servo which was ultimately unsuccessful. While there are more than a few companies uinf r…

> Go had google driving adoption

This is commonly said but I think it's only correct in the sense that Google is famous and Google engineers started it.

Google never drove adoption; it happened organically.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#712

Post by vaylian »

pcwalton wrote: post #606
raincole wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a good feature, but still a niche one. It's a bit like choosing Unity only because of DOTS. For a few projects perhaps it make sense. But just a few ones.

Nobody said that every game needs that level of performance. But saying that it's a solution looking for a problem is not true. I'm fully in favor of having Bevy support dynamic languages, as implemented in for example bevy_mod_scripting [1], for projects that don't need that parallel performance. [1]: https://github.com/makspll/bevy_mod_scripting

Good scripting support is probably the way to go for Rust game development anyway in order to achieve high iteration/idea testing velocity. We could have a script engine that memory-manages various in-game objects and the scripts call into Rust functions to do the heavy lifting. Those Rust functions will typically take things by reference from the script engine so that memory-management is mostly a non-issue.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#713

Post by throwaway2037 »

hot_gril wrote: post #420
jacobgorm wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C++ classes with inheritance are a pretty good match for objects in a 3D (or 2D) world, which is why C++ became popular with 3D game programmers.

Yeah, OOP makes sense for games. The language will matter a bit for which one takes off, but anything will work given enough support. Like, Python doesn't inherently make a lot of sense for data processing or AI, but it's good enough.

To be clear, the reason why Python is so popular for data wrangling (including ML/AI) is not due to the language itself. It is due to the popular extensions (libraries) exclusively written in C & C++! Without these libraries, no one would bother with Python for these tasks. They would use C++, Java, or .NET. Hell, even Perl is much faster than Python for data processing using only the language and not native extensions.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#714

Post by pjmlp »

nu11ptr wrote: post #119
sgt wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean.. Java is there. Java 23 is really interesting.

When is Java getting value types? It has been talked about forever now.

And it will still take time to come, the whole engineering problem is how to introduce value types, make classes that are clearly value types like Optional, turn into value types, while at the same time not breaking the endless amount of JAR files in production, when upgrading to a JVM with value types support enabled.

They would get it sooner by breaking the ecosystem, and as Python 3, Java 9, .NET Core have shown, not everyone would be racing to adopt the new shiny thingy.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#715

Post by Sn0wCoder »

zozbot234 wrote: post #346
pcwalton wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, the Google folks are also funding efforts to improve Rust/C++ interop, per https://security.googleblog.com/2024/02/improving-interopera...

Thanks for the link. This one was also posted awhile back in a rust comment and when I first read it, I thought Google had used Rust in the V8 sandbox, but re-reading it seems that the article uses Rust as an ‘example’ of a memory safe language but does not explicitly say that it uses Rust. Maybe someone with more knowledge can confirm that Rust was (or was not) used in the V8 Google Chrome sandbox example….

https://v8.dev/blog/sandbox

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#716

Post by pjmlp »

andrepd wrote: post #68
nu11ptr wrote: post #19

As much as I love Rust I sometimes wonder if I'd be more productive in a simpler language. If I wrote it every day I'm not sure that would be true, but as a hobbyist coming back to Rust sometimes takes me a bit to get back in the zone. Also, still not a fan of async, as it is woefully incomplete and fairly complicated in some use cases. That said, I just can't go back to Go with nil pointers and lack of decent enums/…

Rust is in a separate class of go and swift and kotlin and etc. The class it competes on is pretty C, C++, and itself. Yes it's easier to write trivial code in python than Rust. Yes it's harder to manage memory manually than it is to let a gc handle it. I don't see the point. Rust is a systems programming language. It's hard to write a server in it than it is to hack something in node, but it will also be faster and…

For Apple, Swift is their Rust, regardless of the world outside Apple's ecosystem thinks about it.

It is clearly stated on Swift's documentation, they already hold a couple of talks at C++ conferences about code migration, and is one of the reasons why nowadays they mostly focus on LLVM contributions instead of clang.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#717

Post by andai »

I think the crux is this heading: Making a fun & interesting games is about rapid prototyping and iteration, Rust's values are everything but that

Jon Blow said that in one of his talks: Rust treats all code as production code. For most of the duration of a project, that's counterproductive, because it introduces a significant amount of unnecessary friction.

For most of a game's development, you're trying to figure out what the game's supposed to be. Only later does it crystallize. Rust doesn't recognize the non-crystalline phase, or rather explicitly rejects it as invalid.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#718

Post by throwaway2037 »

philiplu wrote: post #506
georgeecollins wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked on many of Activision's games 1995-2000 and C++ was the overwhelming choice of programming language for PC games. C was more common for console. In 1996 the quality of MSFT IDE/ Compiler, plus the CPUs available at the time was such that it could take an hour to compile a big game. By 1998 it was a few minutes. As I recall I think MSFT purchased another companies compiler and that really changed Visual Studi…

I was a developer on the Microsoft C++ compiler team from 1991 to 2006. We definitely didn't purchase someone else's compiler in that time. We looked at the EDG front end at various times but never moved over to it while I was there. Perhaps the speed-up you remember had something to do with the switch-over from 16 bits to 32, which would have been the early to mid 90s. Or you're thinking of Microsoft's C compiler st…

I heard that early versions of C++ IntelliSense from Visual Studio used Edison Design Group's (EDG) front end. Is that true? No trolling here -- honest question. If yes, are they still using it now?

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#719

Post by fire_lake »

logicprog wrote: post #489
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…

As I said in my own comment down thread, despite being a huge rust advocate, I sincerely agree with you here. Rust is not a good language for actually writing games, and the fact that it is being sold as such is really detrimental to it in my opinion, because it is holding the ecosystem back. Rust is being pushed as a language for game logic, so people try out and realize it isn't very good at that, and so they just…

But people want to write Rust and a game seems like a fun way to do it. They can already use Godot or Unity with this approach.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#720

Post by int_19h »

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/…

And yet the fact that Bannerlord game logic is entirely in C# makes this possible:

https://github.com/int19h/Bannerlord.CSharp.Scripting

which in turn makes it a lot easier and more convenient to mod. Try that with Rust...

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