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Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

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Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#361

Post by WalterBright »

p0nce wrote: post #336
WalterBright wrote: post #43

> Making a fun & interesting games is about rapid prototyping and iteration, Rust's values are everything but that I found this to be true of C after many, many years coding in C. I noticed that the first selection of data layout stayed throughout the life of the code (with a lot of tweaks, additions, etc.). But didn't really think that much about it. Until I started writing code in D. It was easy to change the data…

I agree, and D with the GC lets me prototype quickly. Its type system gets progressively stricter with constraints, for code that survives. I wouldn't want all the type system to apply to prototype code or a nascent program.

I tend to add in the constraints only after the code works. Two different parts of my brain.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#362

Post by scruple »

VelesDude wrote: post #344
pcwalton wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It was a few years back that the question came up to the developers of a Call of Duty title. "Is there still code from Quake 3 in COD?". They dodge around it by saying something like "we cannot deny this but e use the most appropriate tech where needed". While not confirmation, I wouldn't be surprised if there is a few nuggets of Q3 in that code base still doing some of the basics. That would be really cool if it is…

If that's the question... Let me assure you that there are decades-old pieces of code inside of, and used to assemble, many modern AAA games coming out of mature studios. The systems and tooling is typically carried forward. I don't think this is some big secret and you've intuited exactly the reason why:

> game dev tools are about what can get the best results quickest rather than any sort of technical specifics. It is a business after all.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#363

Post by matheusmoreira »

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, with a huge number of clients sending in requests.

Can you please elaborate on this? I see a lot of similar concerns in other contexts too. Linux kernel's scheduler for example. Is it a throughput/latency tradeoff?

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#364

Post by Sleaker »

Great article, but on ECS I thought the primary point of using it was locality of memory so that you don't get cache misses during iteration of elements. Yes you are preferring composition over inheritance but I thought that was more of a side-benefit to the main thing ECS was trying to solve.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#365

Post by meheleventyone »

synergy20 wrote: post #345
pavlov wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also C++ could be adopted incrementally by C developers. You could use it as “C with classes”, or just use operator overloading to make vector math more tolerable, or whatever subset that you happened to like. So there’s really three forces at play in making C++ the standard: 1) The Microsoft ecosystem. They literally stopped supporting C by not adopting the C99 standard in their compiler. If you wanted any modern co…

not true anymore, c11 and c17 are either supported or coming https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/c11-and-c17-standard-...

Not really relevant to 30 years ago though.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#366

Post by the_af »

taeric wrote: post #313

Oh my, this has to be my favorite quote in a blog in a long long time. "... many if not most of the problems don't go away if one isn't willing to constantly refactor their code and treat programming as a puzzle solving process, rather than just a tool to get things done." I have thought it was just me for a long time, but many of the popular styles of programming that we push definitely seem to require constant refa…

It is a great quote!

I think multiple refactors in pursuit of a solution can be a good thing. As your thinking/design evolves, so does the shape of the solution.

The main problem, I think, is that this goes against specifically gamedev. In gamedev whether the solution is the best or more resilient is secondary to extremely fast iteration and delivering something. Like the author says, sometimes "clunky but good enough for now" is what you need to get it over with (for the moment) an iterate rapidly over the gameplay elements you should spend most of your time on. Gameplay, not correctness or reliability or maintainability, is the most important thing in a game.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#367

Post by Yoric »

erikbye wrote: post #261
Yoric wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

Absolutely.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#368

Post by JoshTriplett »

Ygg2 wrote: post #199
JoshTriplett wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone who has experienced real problems as a result of a specific mechanism is not required to solve every single problem with alternatives to that mechanism before saying "this mechanism has caused me real problems and it'd be nice if there were a better alternative that didn't cause those problems". > The moment you allow this, you have to find a way to pick between several implementation - and they don't always…

Disclaimer: I'm aware you guys are working on relaxing orphan rules, and I wish you the best of luck. But as an outsider, orphan rule doesn't seem to be going anywhere soon. And if the original poster had said that I would be ok. Instead what they said is: > It's a great example of something I'd call "muh safety", desire for perfection and complete avoidance of all problems at all costs, even if it means significantl…

> But you still need a resolution mechanism to fix the error

At least initially, the resolution mechanism could be "don't include more than one implementation".

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#369

Post by alcover »

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…

  > I'd think that an ideal game dev language would be programmer time efficient, reasonably performant and designed for skilled programmers who can handle a language filled with footguns. Basically a better version of C such as a selective subset of C++ or a Golang without garbage collection.
I agree so much that I've been working on this for a whole year.

There is a sweet spot : non-GC, with pointers (but bounded), inference, basic OOP + tacking, and all the comforts of scripts. All in a good looking syntax without semi-colons.

So you can program fast and get a fast program.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#370

Post by fidotron »

fire_lake wrote: post #152
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…

Isn’t the trait system exactly the way out of this tar pit?

Obviously that is the intention, but the absence of libraries that manage to replicate what people manage fairly easily in other paradigms does show it's not sufficient.

golang is similar in this regard - it has interfaces and you can compose type structs, but the results become an unwieldy mess unless the developers are staggeringly disciplined, in which case they'll have a better time in something else anyway.

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