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Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

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Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#251

Post by CharlieDigital »

fidotron wrote: post #71

Starting by saying I fundamentally agree wrt iteration speed. This is ultimately why [C/C++]/Lua was such a thing for a while, and it seems quite plausible that you could benefit from a core engine in rust bound to a scripting language. But ultimately I sense the subtext here is much the same as with other Rust problems: the object oriented baby has been thrown out with the bathwater, often in the name of premature o…

YMMV, but I find C# and TypeScript to have a "Goldilocks" mix of OOP and FP that you can take advantage of the strengths of each where it makes sense.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#252

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #192
cogman10 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> incendiary responses to rust criticism can be I've not experienced this. Do you have examples of the rust community flaming someone for having negative opinions about the language?

I'd go read their mailing list and Reddit forms; especially when people run into issues doing stuff that's very simple in other languages. Never seen a more toxic programming community. Hopefully they calm down, or really get drown out, once there are a real number of jobs for people using Rust. Right now the evangelists outnumber the rank and file who are just using a language to get work done.

That does not mirror my experience.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#253

Post by hi-v-rocknroll »

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.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#254

Post by sidkshatriya »

kbolino wrote: post #220
margorczynski wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just can't go back to Go with nil pointers and lack of decent enums/ADTs/pattern matching either. Go is simply a badly designed language where the idea of "simplicity" has been maligned and proven bad ideas likes nil/null, exceptions and such have been introduced in a seemingly modern language. One would think that decades of Java, Javascript, etc. code blowing up because of this issues would teach someone someth…

Having worked with Go for about a decade now, I largely agree that nil is a pain in the ass to work with, and the language has largely done nothing to make it better. However, Go (mostly) doesn't have exceptions. Ordinary problems are represented by non-nil errors, which are values. Panics exist but really are reserved for exceptional situations (with the number 1 cause being, of course, dereferencing nil).

Nil in go is my biggest gripe with the language. Why keep repeating “the billion dollar mistake” in a relatively newly designed language??

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#255

Post by jsheard »

Klonoar wrote: post #240
jsheard wrote: post #5

Has there been any progress towards shipping Rust on consoles? I know the specifics are all under NDA, but to my knowledge nobody has even hinted that they've done it yet, even among the studios which are openly using Rust for backend or tooling stuff (e.g. Embark and Treyarch). OP only appears to release their games on PC so it's not a concern for them, but for the majority of developers not being able to fit into c…

Rust has had tier 3 support for the Switch since 1.64, I believe. Someone had actually done it even before that but IIRC NDAs mucked up any movement on making that public.

Yeah, that Switch support was added by the homebrew side of the fence though so I don't know if it's something that developers would be able to use in an officially licensed game. Nintendo might not care so much as long as the game works, as mentioned it's Sony in particular that I've heard is picky about which compilers their developers use.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#256

Post by whoknowsidont »

duped wrote: post #154
telekid wrote: post #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.

> Type checkers shouldn't get in the way of your code compiling. I don't get it, what's the point of type checking if not to reject invalid programs? The point of a type system isn't simply to add annotations to a programmer (and some type systems can omit them entirely) but to define the subset of programs that are correct within the set of all the programs that can be expressed. I understand (and have used in produ…

>I don't get it, what's the point of type checking if not to reject invalid programs

It can take longer to think about how to properly type instead of just writing some code, testing it out, and immediately seeing if something is wrong. You also often get into a situation where linters who like to act like type-systems give you arcane errors (looking at you TypeScript).

In the moment I just want to move some data around and quickly try out an idea, I don't need it to be resilient or perfect.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#257

Post by npalli »

Just waiting for someone to write a 5000 word essay on why they are moving from Rust to do data science stuff. Totally puzzled by everyone trying to get on to the Rust bandwagon on DS/DE, when being able to iterate and make changes fast is why Python rules even though it is dog slow.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#258

Post by bluGill »

masklinn wrote: post #102
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…

> My impression of Rust is that it's a very opinionated language It's not though. There's only one thing Rust is opinionated about. > that wants everybody to program in a specific way that emphasizes memory safety above everything. Well yes, that is literally the core proposition and purpose of the language. That's like saying java is opinionated because it wants to manage the memory. > I just don't think the kinds o…

Rust also is opinionated that you don't want to write shared libraries or plugins. You can do both, but only if you drop down to memory unsafe C interfaces. The default is statically compile all applications into one program. Rust also really wants you do to use their build system and package manager, you can avoid both but everything will fight you.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#259

Post by layer8 »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #148

I've been thinking of embarking on a Rust/GUI/Game. Guess, this will save some grief. Is Rust the future? Will this situation improve? I've been wanting to like Rust, but this seems to be indictment.

It’s unlikely to improve anytime soon, and there are no indications that Rust will be the future of game programming.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#260

Post by pcwalton »

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.

Why? Those kinds of game engines are enormous amounts of code, and there's little incentive to rewrite.

I do strongly disagree that we aren't ever going to see large-scale game development in Rust; it just takes time. Whether games adopt an engine is largely about that engine's maturity rather than anything about the language. Bevy is quite young; 0.13 doesn't even have support for animation blending yet (I landed that for 0.14).

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