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Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

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Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#301

Post by celdon25 »

hi-v-rocknroll wrote: post #253
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.

Does Crystal support Hot Reloading? The slow compilation speed is a non-starter for me.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#302

Post by hamilyon2 »

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…

I really hope that C++ evolves with gamedev and they become more and more symbiotic.

Maybe adoption of rust by gamedev community isn't the best thing to wish to happen to language. Maybe it is better to let other crowd to steer evolution of rust, letting system programming and gamedev drift apart

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#303

Post by thom »

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/…

Hard to know what TaleWorlds are actually optimising for because half the features of Bannerlord feel like they’ve never been played by a dev let alone iterated on.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#304

Post by jvanderbot »

popcar2 wrote: post #46

> Rust gamedev ecosystem lives on hype I've been saying this for years. I've tried to get into Rust multiple times the past few years and one of the things I've tried was gamedev with Rust (specifically the library ggez when it was still being worked on, and a little bit of Bevy). I admittedly never got far, but I gave it a solid shot. My experience was instantly terrible. Slow compile times and iterations, huge pack…

This might be controversial, but "Safety" and "Speed", in the same ecosystem, are not free. The cost is heavy syntax and heavy cognitive climbs. Why Rust was ever sold as a language for the masses is beyond me. A safe, fast, hard language is something you use for operating systems, aircraft, etc.

I adore Rust because it does all the things I remember being told to do in C, but without me remembering to do them: Error codes from all functions, Ownership models, etc. But those are not good reasons for me to use it for anything I wouldn't use C for.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#305

Post by netbioserror »

I use Nim at work. It is a joy. I replaced a prototype Rust application which was confirmedly not a joy. None of Rust's highly opinionated safety semantics necessarily imply a better end product, and often make delivering an end product much more difficult. Rust has use cases, but it is a specialized hammer for a specific domain of nails. It is not the cure-all everyone wants it to be.

If you're asking if you should use Rust and you don't have a highly specific embedded use case, you should probably just use a language with decent RC or GC. As an additional bonus, 99.9% of the code you write in a GC language never has to be about memory at all. Business logic, clean and bare.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#307

Post by msla »

citizen_friend wrote: post #176
msla wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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 f…

What does this after do with the topic?

I'm comparing one unusual language (Rust) with another language (Haskell) and examining why the first gets push-back whereas the second gets more positive mentions.

They both have a single odd idea that's hard to wrap your head around at first, Rust's borrow checker and Haskell's type system with its enforced immutability by default, and which intentionally drives program design, in that both languages demand you write your program such that the static analysis can prove it's valid, but Rust's borrow checker seems to get more people throwing their hands up and leaving the language than Haskell's type system does.

Haskell's type system can be a bit inexpressive, sometimes, too, and there are language extensions which address some of this, but it seems to hit more of a sweet spot where, in most programs, if the type system is forbidding something, you really do have some kind of error in your thinking leading to inconsistent code. Plus, it enables design instead of just forbidding, because you know that any function which is valid in the type system is at least sensical to use in a given context.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#308

Post by unclad5968 »

SeanAnderson wrote: post #236

I've experienced a lot of these concerns while building https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants I have a simple question that maybe someone smarter than me can answer confidently: If I want to build something akin to Dwarf Fortress (in terms of simulation complexity) as a browser-first experience - what stack should I choose? Originally, I prototyped something out using React, PixiJS, and ReactPixi ( https://github.com/M…

I personally would use C++ with SDL2, but I use c++ a lot already so I'm biased. Emscripten would allow you to target WASM.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#309

Post by Xeamek »

pcwalton wrote: post #239

As someone who's become a core contributor to Bevy lately, while also doing contract work in Unity on the side, I obviously disagree with the idea that Rust isn't up to the task of game dev. The grass isn't greener on the Unity side, with a mountain of technical debt holding the engine back. (They're still using Boehm GC in 2024!) Bevy is a breath of fresh air just because it's relatively new and free of legacy. Usin…

As for ECS, it's not really about upsides or downsides. It's about the fact that Rust effectively forces You to use ECS everywhere, because 'normal' game objects interacting won't fly under borrow checker.

And no matter how many upsides ECS can have, being forced to use it everywhere, rather when You want to, is the painfully part.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#310

Post by cshenton »

My experience is that the ecosystem is a mess, have hit winit, wgpu, and countless bevy bugs, iteration times are abysmal, documentation is nonexistent. In the time it would take me to make a game in popular Rust tooling I could build the game and engine from scratch in C and also have something that would crash less.
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