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Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

loglog.games

21–30 of 996 posts

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#21

Unity is so good and quite affordable, basically there’s zero upfront risk of using it. Similar for Unreal Engine. And then there are tons of other open-source engines like Godot that are also quite good. Rust is great from lots of stuff but game development or building UIs isn’t among that (yet).

To be fair, building UIs with iced-rs is getting better by the minute. My favorite showcase for using that library is this IRC client called halloy: https://github.com/squidowl/halloy

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#22

> The problem you're having is only a problem because you haven't tried hard enough. You just need to read another 50,000 word fasterthanlime essay. Then you'll not have problems any more. > That being said, there is an overwhelming force in the Rust community that when anyone mentions they're having problems with Rust the language on a fundamental level, the answer is "you just don't get it yet, I promise once you g…

this reminds me of Lispen of ye olde.. wait untill it clicks, man!

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#23
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/…

Isn't that just Swift/Kotlin?

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#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 sounds extremely obnoxious to deal with.

I'd think that an ideal game dev language would be programmer time efficient, reasonably performant and designed for skilled programmers who can handle a language filled with footguns. Basically a better version of C such as a selective subset of C++ or a Golang without garbage collection. I just don't think the kinds of security bugs you get from C/C++ "unsafe" code are that big of a deal for games but they would be for a web site or an enterprise database.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#25
post #8

tl;dr -- Rust is not the language for startups who want fast iterations and are still finding it's pmf. It is perfect for rewrites of popular system software which already has millions of users and running in production because once a software becomes mature and at million user scale, safety and security becomes paramount

> for rewrites of popular system software which already has millions of users and running in production

Hopefully, it's perfect for more than that.

Rewriting a system that's already acheived that scale is a contentious decision, to say the least. Many of our colleagues have been lost to and scarred by well-meaning attempts to rewrite those systems in the past, including many who were sure it was the right choice for "safety and security" themselves. For every conceptual safeguard new tooling might give you, you invite countless and sometimes catastrophic regressions in actual application logic in writing new implementations. It can work out, but no tool can expect to live only on that kind of work.

I'm sure Rust has much broader applicability than that. Or I hope so at least.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#26

> The problem you're having is only a problem because you haven't tried hard enough. You just need to read another 50,000 word fasterthanlime essay. Then you'll not have problems any more. > That being said, there is an overwhelming force in the Rust community that when anyone mentions they're having problems with Rust the language on a fundamental level, the answer is "you just don't get it yet, I promise once you g…

>> The problem you're having is only a problem because you haven't tried hard enough.

And it actually does work that way with Haskell, in my experience. There's a big hill to get over where you flail against the type system, IO monad and all, and then you realize that, while Haskell's type system isn't perfect, being able to say

    Num t => (t -> b) -> [t] -> [b]
is really pretty powerful, and being able to search for functions by type signature is just plain convenient.

But Haskell isn't for every problem in the way Rust is apparently made out to be. For example, I've seen some posts about developing games in Haskell, but it isn't common, and nobody would try to push a game developer into using Haskell.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#28
This article describes almost exactly why I think gradual typing is actually a good thing. Type checkers shouldn't get in the way of your code compiling. Yes, the language has to be designed with this property from the beginning. Yes, you should always enforce complete checking in CI. But you should also be able to try half-baked ideas.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#29

> The problem you're having is only a problem because you haven't tried hard enough. You just need to read another 50,000 word fasterthanlime essay. Then you'll not have problems any more. > That being said, there is an overwhelming force in the Rust community that when anyone mentions they're having problems with Rust the language on a fundamental level, the answer is "you just don't get it yet, I promise once you g…

this reminds me of Lispen of ye olde.. wait untill it clicks, man!

Lisp is pretty normal if you're accustomed to, like, Python: It's a GC'd procedural language.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#30
post #11
post #7

Rust is the "frontend wave" of the backends. All the woke kids gravitate towards it. A suffix of "Written in Rust" is a thing here so I'm throwing away my internet points now.

I think most people here understand that a language that is great for kernel development isn't necessarily great for everything else.

Oh the language is good, it's the people. Cult-like.
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