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Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

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Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#261

Post by erikbye »

Yoric wrote: post #241
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…

Well, as far as I can tell, in the big language shootout (which is still the only decent language benchmark I know, but if you have others, I'd be happy to read them), in all the individual benchmarks I've looked at Rust is either first or within 3% performance of being first. So, this suggests that Rust is actually pretty good for raw performance. In addition, I know that I'm way more productive for prototyping and…

> Interestingly, all these companies are migrating some of their systems to Rust. This suggests that they find the language convincing enough.

I feel most large companies and some smaller ones are interested in trying out Rust, it's trendy. But time will show for which parts the switch was advantageous; and I'm very interested in the findings. The premise of the language is indeed convincing a lot of people. People do however, choose the wrong tool for the wrong job all the time, OP's article in point.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#262

Post by Xeamek »

littlestymaar wrote: post #231
colund wrote: post #48

I find that Jonathan Blow ranting about Rust game development here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4t1K66dMhWk . He adds interesting perspectives to the discussio, how the language makes the Rust game developer resort to arrays and their so called Rust point of views.

Well the problem with Jonathan's argument here is that he's spent the past decade mostly ranting about Rust and working to make a perfect game programming language, instead of making games. So it turn out that even if he's opinion on Rust is correct, he would still have been much more productive using it than trying to build his own language for a decade… (But he already shipped his masterpiece and he's a millionaire…

He is actively developing his new game in parallel to creating the language.

Not to mention smaller projects like 'Braid- anniversary edition'.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#263

Post by samatman »

satvikpendem wrote: post #123
Pxtl wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since every other language now has higher order functions and lexical closures and things like that Lisp isn't as special as it used to be. Now it's mostly just a really ugly version of those languages but with a weird emphasis on recursion and a very fancy macro facility. I find I can move between dynamic languages and Scheme pretty easily.

Lisp is homoiconic which most other languages are not. This makes it useful for certain applications over others.

Julia has convinced me that the value of this is limited. It turns out to be enough to have the AST as a first-class value in the language, which can be manipulated and emitted via macros at compile time, or fed to eval at run time.

The more usual Lisps (I consider Julia, like Dylan before it, to be a Lisp) give up most of the advantages of syntax in exchange for an admittedly eloquent macro system. Julia gets the advantage of syntax, and a macro system which is of equal expressive power but less easy to use. Also, in Julia, a macro leads with `@`, the way a macro in Rust ends with `!`, meaning you can read the difference between a macro and a function at the call site. I consider that a good thing.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#264

Post by duped »

ativzzz wrote: post #177
duped wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Because often, and especially with heavily interactive programs like games or UIs (any web page), you don't know if something will be good or not until you build some working version of it. The more barriers there are (type checkers, compiler errors, etc), the longer it will take you to prototype something usable to check if what you're building is good. Sometimes, it's useful to bypass these things for a prototype a…

But a type error isn't an edge case! It means you've written something the compiler can't understand.

> This is why typescript is so popular on the web - you can quickly prototype something with JS, then once you find the right solution, add types and productionize the code

I think you've got it backwards - TS is popular because people want to use types up front, but it has to work with JS, which is so dynamic that it's impossible to write a sound type system that can even touch it.

I don't want to reply "git gud" but I really am struggling to understand how people are writing code that where it is so difficult to use type information or where changing it is so cumbersome that you think it's a barrier. And I don't see many games or performant GUIs written in dynamically typed languages, particularly outside the web. Even in very dynamic languages like Objective C, things are still well typed.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#265

Post by timeon »

imiric wrote: post #109

This is a sobering read. Thank you for sharing. This sums it up for me: > Rust as both language and community is so preoccupied with avoiding problems at all cost that it completely loses sight of what matters, delivering an experience that is so good that whatever problems are there aren't really important. This doesn't mean "ship crap games", it means focusing on the game being a good game, not on the code being go…

> User experience is ultimately all that matters.

It should be but current state of web will show you that it is often not.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#266

Post by tedajax »

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/…

This comment is nonsense

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#267

Post by stephc_int13 »

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/…

Yeah this is a common problem in the industry, we rarely have enough time to refactor what should be considered prototype-level code into robust code.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#268

Post by hot_gril »

kibwen wrote: post #221
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…

Exactly, it's all about the ecosystem and very little about the language features

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#269

Post by zamalek »

duped wrote: post #228
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.

Absolutely. Async/await typically improves headroom (scalability) at the cost of latency and throughput. It may also make code easier to reason about.
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