211–220 of 799 posts
I really like Rust as a replacement for C++, especially given that C++ seems to become crazier every year. When reasonable, nowadays I always use Rust instead of C++. But for the vast majority of projects, I believe that C++ is not the right language, meaning that Rust isn't, either. I feel like many people choose Rust because is sounds like it's more efficient, a bit as if people went for C++ instead of a JVM langua…
> Bevy is still in the early stages of development. Important features are missing. Documentation is sparse. A new version of Bevy containing breaking changes to the API is released approximately once every 3 months.
I would choose Bevy if and only if I would like to be heavily involved in the development of Bevy itself.
And never for anything that requires a steady foundation.
Programming language does not matter. Choose the right tool for job and be pragmatic.
The fact that people love the language is an unexpected downside. In my experience the rust ecosystem has an insanely high churn rate. Crates are often abandoned seemingly for no reason, often before even hitting 1.0. My theory is this is because people want to use rust primarily, the domain problem is just a challenge, like a level in a game. Once all the fun parts are solved, they leave it for dead. Conversely and…
There is not chance for any language, not matter how good is it, to match the most horrendous (web!) but full-featured ui toolkit.
I bet, 1000%, that is easier to do a OS, a database engine, etc that try to match QT, Delphi, Unity, etc.
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I made a decision that has become the most productive and problem-less approach of make UIs in my 30 years doing this:
1- Use the de-facto UI toolkit as-is (html, swift ui, jetpack compose). Ignore any tool that promise cross-platform UI (so that is html, but I mean: I don't try to do html in swift, ok?).
2- Use the same idea of html: Send plain data with the full fidelity of what you wanna render: Label(text=.., size=..).
3- Render it directly from the native UI toolkit.
Yes, this is more or less htmx/tailwindcss (I get the inspiration from them).
This mean my logic is full Rust, I pass serializable structs to the UI front-end and render directly from it. Critically, the UI toolkit is nearly devoid of any logic more complex that what you see in a mustache template language.. Not do the localization, formatting, etc. Only UI composition.
I don't care that I need to code in different ways, different apis, different flows, and visually divergent UIs.
IS GREAT.
After the pain of boilerplate, doing the next screen/component/wwhatever is so ridiculous simple that is like cheating.
So, the problem is not Rust. Is not F#, or Lisp. Is that UI is a kind of beast that is imperious to be improved by language alone.
Using poor quality AI suggestions as a reason not to use Rust is a super weird argument. Something is very wrong with such idea. What's going to be next, avoiding everything where AI performs poorly? Scripting being flexible is a proper idea, but that's not an argument against Rust either. Rather it's an argument for more separation between scripting machinery and the core engine. For example Godot allows using Rust…
GC isn't a big problem for many types of apps/games, and most games don't care about memory safety. Rust's advantages aren't so important in this domain, while its complexity remains. No surprise he prefers C# for this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well it is upon each one to be good with their craft. If not, the language they pick doesn't really make a difference in the end. It is like complaining playing a music instrument to be in band or orchestra requires too much effort, naturally.
Except here you are a trained pianist and the tour manager gave you a pipe organ or a harpsichord.
Great musicians make a symphony out of what they can get their hands on.
The fact that people love the language is an unexpected downside. In my experience the rust ecosystem has an insanely high churn rate. Crates are often abandoned seemingly for no reason, often before even hitting 1.0. My theory is this is because people want to use rust primarily, the domain problem is just a challenge, like a level in a game. Once all the fun parts are solved, they leave it for dead. Conversely and…
Feeling passionate about a programming language is generally bad for the products made with that language.
More than anything else, this sounds like a good lesson in why commercial game engines have taken over most of game dev. There are so many things you have to do to make a game, but they're mostly quite common and have lots of off-the-shelf solutions. That is, any sufficiently mature indie game project will end up implementing an informally specified, ad hoc, bug-ridden implementation of Unity (... or just use the inf…
And yet, if making your own game engine makes it intellectually stimulating enough to actually make and ship a game, usually for near free, going 10x slower is still better than going at a speed of zero.
Generally, I've seen the exact opposite. People who code their own engines tend to get sucked into the engine and forget that they're supposed to be shipping a game. (I say this as someone who has coded their own engine, multiple times, and ended up not shipping a game--though I had a lot of fun working on the engine.)
The problem is that the fun, cool parts about building your own game engine are vastly outnumbered by the boring parts: supporting level and save data loading/storage, content pipelines, supporting multiple input devices and things like someone plugging in an XBox controller while the game is running and switching all the input symbols to the new input device in real time, supporting various display resolutions and supporting people plugging in new displays while the game is running, and writing something that works on PC/mobile/Switch(2)/XBox/Playstation... all solved problems, none of which are particularly intellectually stimulating to solve correctly.
If someone's finances depend on shipping a game that makes money, there's really no question that you should use Unity or Unreal. Maybe Godot but even that's a stretch. There's a small handful of indie custom game engine success stories, including some of my favorites like The Witness and Axiom Verge, but those are exceptions rather than the rule. And Axiom Verge notably had to be deeply reworked to get a Switch release, because it's built on MonoGame.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Oftentimes the data gets organized in parallel arrays ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_array ) instead of in collections of structs. This can save a lot of memory (because the data gets packed more densely) be more cache-friendly, and makes it much easier to make efficient use of SIMD instructions. That seems like something that could very easily be turned into a compiler optimisation and enabled with somet…
Meh. I've tried "SIMD magic wand" tools before, and found them to be verschlimmbessern. At least on the scientific computing side of things, having the way the code says the data is organized match the way the data is actually organized ends up being a lot easier in the long run than organizing it in a way that gives frontend developers warm fuzzies and then doing constant mental gymnastics to keep track of what the…