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Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

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Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#221

Post by kibwen »

Animats wrote: post #137

That's a good article. He's right about many things. I've been writing a metaverse client in Rust for several years now. Works with Second Life and Open Simulator servers. Here's some video.[1] It's about 45,000 lines of safe Rust. Notes: * There are very few people doing serious 3D game work in Rust. There's Veloren, and my stuff, and maybe a few others. No big, popular titles. I'd expected some AAA title to be writ…

> 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 the turn of the millenium, in the wake of Quake 3 (buoyed by the new features of C++98).

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#222

Post by pixelesque »

TillE wrote: post #212
LarsDu88 wrote: post #79

I've done hobby gamedev in Bevy/Rust, Godot/C#, and Unity C#. It's honestly somewhat baffling to me that folks will choose Rust for gamedev right now. The state of the open sourced tools are just not there yet, especially when compared to Godot, and at the same time these games are running on PC hardware which tends to get faster every year. Also for ECS... one thing I tended to realize is that when developing a game…

CPUs are way way faster, but RAM latency has barely improved in the past couple decades. That's why cache-optimized systems like ECS can still be a dramatic improvement when you're simulating a lot of stuff. Like, thousands of active objects.

They can be improvements, but you can do Data-Oriented Programming without ECS systems, i.e. Structure Of Arrays, which is what we often using in Rendering/Simulation for VFX for SIMD/GPU compute...

But similarly, ECSs can be slower, if they don't have some optimisations, i.e. spatial data structure lookups: just using a generic ECS "database" system without any first-class spatial knowledge / acceleration structure lookup ability, is likely going to be slower.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#223

Post by sgt »

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.

Good question. I think it must be this one: https://openjdk.org/jeps/401

I can't see it in the feature list of JDK 22 or even 23. Maybe it'll come in JDK 24?

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#224

Post by api »

amelius wrote: post #12
zooq_ai wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly!

C/C++ -> move fast and break things Rust -> move slowly and don't break anything

Yes, and if you want move fast and don't break things you need a higher level language like Go, Java, C#, etc.

I'm pretty fast in Rust but not as fast as Go, mostly because Rust's type system and borrow semantics come with a higher cognitive load.

I find both to be faster than C++. Rust is faster because I have to worry less about blowing my feet off with memory errors. I can't think of anything to recommend C++ now that Rust exists.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#225

Post by darthdeus »

desiderantes wrote: post #66

That logo is huge on mobile so I can't read the first few bullet points.

Author here, sorry about that, I just deployed a fix, should be readable now. If it's not, here's the first few points

- Once you get good at Rust all of these problems will go away - Rust being great at big refactorings solves a largely self-inflicted issues with the borrow checker - Indirection only solves some problems, and always at the cost of dev ergonomics - ECS solves the wrong kind problem - Generalized systems don't lead to fun gameplay - Making a fun & interesting games is about rapid prototyping and iteration, Rust's values are everything but that - Procedural macros are not even "we have reflection at home" - ...

the list corresponds to the titles of sections in the article.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#226

Post by gwern »

Keyframe wrote: post #22
HL33tibCe7 wrote: post #3

> 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!

He mentions Common Lisp as something he did a game in, and you can see the link he praises https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72y2EC5fkcE as basically a very well-developed Lisp image approach with timetravel debugging etc aimed at game dev. So the implicit comparison to Lisps is sort of a big undercurrent to this whole article.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#227

Post by erikbye »

lsllc wrote: post #214
erikbye wrote: post #182

Rust... what is it good for? "Systems programming" ... Rust is not good for raw performance. Neither for prototyping and iteration. Personally I think operating systems (kernels) should be as performant as possible, and C/C++ has been good enough for decades. Anyone really unhappy with Linux/BSD/Windows/macOS performance? What systems are we talking about that benefits from Rust? Advanced weapon systems that should a…

No, I'm not concerned with Linux/BSD/macOS performance, it's pretty good (I took Windows out because it does have performance issues [0]!). What I am concerned about is security bugs, memory errors, buffer overflows etc, all of the things Rust attempts to solve [1]. I think for weapons & flight control, ATC systems, we already have Ada that's designed for "can't fail systems". [0] https://www.blobstreaming.org/former…

I agree, operating systems should have less out-of-bounds memory issues. Is that Rust's place? Replacing the parts of OS code where it's OK to sacrifice some performance?

Ada has a foothold for sure, but there's a surprising amount of C++ in military planes and weapon systems.

I didn't read [0], but the parts of Windows that's poorly performing is not the fault of the language.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#228

Post by duped »

Animats wrote: post #137

That's a good article. He's right about many things. I've been writing a metaverse client in Rust for several years now. Works with Second Life and Open Simulator servers. Here's some video.[1] It's about 45,000 lines of safe Rust. Notes: * There are very few people doing serious 3D game work in Rust. There's Veloren, and my stuff, and maybe a few others. No big, popular titles. I'd expected some AAA title to be writ…

> 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.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#229

Post by TheRoque »

int0x29 wrote: post #147
Animats wrote: post #137

That's a good article. He's right about many things. I've been writing a metaverse client in Rust for several years now. Works with Second Life and Open Simulator servers. Here's some video.[1] It's about 45,000 lines of safe Rust. Notes: * There are very few people doing serious 3D game work in Rust. There's Veloren, and my stuff, and maybe a few others. No big, popular titles. I'd expected some AAA title to be writ…

> * There are very few people doing serious 3D game work in Rust. There's Veloren, and my stuff, and maybe a few others. No big, popular titles. I'd expected some AAA title to be written in Rust by now. That hasn't happened, and it's probably not going to happen, for the reasons the author gives. At one point the studio behind the Finals was writing game server code in Rust with an Unreal engine client. Not sure if t…

The studio you're talking about is Embark studios, and is openly pretty big on Rust [1] I think it was rumored that their next project will use a Rust game engine, but I am not sure how it's going now.

[1] https://github.com/EmbarkStudios/rust-ecosystem

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#230

Post by iknowstuff »

vacuity wrote: post #209
iknowstuff wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://dioxuslabs.com/blog/release-050 Seems promising, very React-esque with little boilerplate

I hope Rust does gain mature options for its GUI ecosystem, but the author of the article makes a very good point that in other languages, there would be mature options in use already. "Seems promising" is too little, too late.

For sure! I would not write a game in Rust in 2024.
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