341–350 of 799 posts
One of the smartest devs I know built his game from scratch in C. Pretty complex game too - 3D open-world management game. It's now successful on steam. Thing is, he didn't make the game in C. He built his game engine in C, and the game itself in Lua. The game engine is specific to this game, but there's a very clear separation where the engine ends and the game starts. This has also enabled amazing modding capabilit…
Rust is fine as a low-level systems programming language. It's a huge improvement over C and (because memory safety) a decent improvement over C++. However, most applications don't need a low-level systems programming language, and trying to shoehorn one where it doesn't belong just leads to sadness without commensurate benefit. Rust does not * automatically make your program fast; * eliminate memory leaks; * elimina…
Languages like Go , JavaScript, C# or Java are much better choices for this purpose. Rust is still best suited for scenarios where traditional system languages excel, such as embedded systems or infrastructure software that needs to run for extended periods.
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> C instead of C++ because "it's faster" (spoiler: it probably doesn't matter for your project) If your C is faster than your C++ then something has gone horribly wrong. C++ has been faster than C for a long time. C++ is about as fast as it gets for a systems language.
> C++ has been faster than C for a long time. What is your basis for this claim? C and C++ are both built on essentially the same memory and execution model. There is a significant set of programs that are valid C and C++ both -- surely you're not suggesting that merely compiling them as C++ will make them faster? There's basically no performance technique available in C++ that is not also available in C. I don't thi…
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But Unity game objects are the same way: you allocate them when they spawn into the scene, and you deallocate them when they despawn. Accessing them after you destroyed them throws an exception. This is exactly the same as entity IDs! The GC doesn't buy you much, other than memory safety, which you can get in other ways (e.g. generational indices, like Bevy does).
But in rust you have to fight the borrow checker a lot, and sometimes concede, with complex referential stuff. I say this as someone who writes a good bit of rust and enjoys doing so.
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C# is a very highly underrated (and oft misunderstood) language that has become more terse as it has aged -- in a very good way. C#'s terseness has not come at the cost of its legibility and in fact, I feel like enhances it in many cases. > The maturity and vast amount of stable historical data for C# and the Unity API mean that tools like Gemini consistently provide highly relevant guidance. This is also a highly un…
C# is a great language, but it's been hampered by slow transition towards AOT. My understanding (not having used it much, precisely because of this) is that AOT is still quite lacking; not very performant and not so seamless when it comes to cross-platform targeting. Do you know if things have gotten better recently? I think fhat Microsoft had dropped the old .NET platform (CLR and so on) sooner and really nailed the…
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…
For all my personal projects, I use a mix of Haskell and Rust, which I find covers 99% of the product domains I work in.
Ultra-low level (FPGA gateware): Haskell. The Clash compiler backend lets you compile (non-recursive) Haskell code directly to FPGA. I use this for audio codecs, IO expanders, and other gateware stuff.
Very low-level (MMUless microcontroller hard-realtime) to medium-level (graphics code, audio code): Rust dominates here
High-level (have an MMU, OS, and desktop levels of RAM, not sensitive to ~0.1ms GC pauses): Haskell becomes a lot easier to productively crank out "business logic" without worrying about memory management. If you need to specify high-level logic, implement a web server, etc. it's more productive than Rust for that type of thing.
Both languages have a lot of conceptual overlap (ADTs, constrained parametric types, etc.), so being familiar with one provides some degree of cross-training for the other.
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I have no experience with FFI between C and Go, could anyone shed some light on this? They are both natively compiled languages – why would calls between them be much slower than any old function call?
There are two reasons: • Go uses its own custom ABI and resizeable stacks, so there's some overhead to switching where the "Go context" must be saved and some things locked. • Go's goroutines are a kind of preemptive green thread where multiple goroutines share the same OS thread. When calling C, the goroutine scheduler must jump through some hoops to ensure that this caller doesn't stall other goroutines on the same…
In Unity, Mono and/or IL2CPP's interop mechanism also ends up in the ballpark of direct call cost.
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Why?
Because it's a discouragement of learning based on mediocrity of AI. I find such idea perpetuating the mediocrity (not just of AI itself but of whatever it's used for). It's like imagine saying, I don't want to learn how write a good story because AI always suggests me writing a bad one anyway. May be that delivers the idea better.
Why would I valorize discarding this kind of automation? Is this just a craft vs. production thing? Like, the same reason I'd use only hand tools when doing joinery in Japanese-style woodworking? There's a place for that! But most woodworkers... use table saws and routers.
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…
> C instead of C++ because "it's faster" (spoiler: it probably doesn't matter for your project) If your C is faster than your C++ then something has gone horribly wrong. C++ has been faster than C for a long time. C++ is about as fast as it gets for a systems language.
That's interesting, did ChatGPT tell you this?