Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

Did you read the part where they said that they're a two-person indie game studio with a development cycle of 3-12 months max?

> 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 layout, and I did for experimenting. For example, changing a reference type to a value type, and vice versa. This was easy in D. It's just too much work in C, so it didn't happen.

The reason is simple:

    p->b
    v.b

To switch between a ref and a value type, you've got to search/replace the -> into ., and the . into ->, and not disturb the dots and arrows of the other types. When dealing with 100,000 lines of code, this is a non-starter.

But with D, both reference and value types are used as:

    p.b
    v.b

making it easy to switch between the two, and also switching function parameters from values back and forth with references.

They mention that they're moving (back) to Unity/C#.

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.

Parts of the Rust community are toxic indeed, but I've been around long enough to recognize the same pattern in communities of other hot programming languages or frameworks in their up-and-coming phase.

There's something about the new hot language/framework/paradigm that always attracts the type of people who wrap their identity up in the hot new thing. They take any criticisms of their new favorite thing as criticisms against themselves, and respond defensively.

What I see now in certain Rust communities feels a lot like what I saw in Golang communities in the early days. I had similar experiences when React was the new kid on the block, too.

Some of these communities/forums are just inhabited by people who thrive on dunking on noobs all day long. The good news is that they tend to get bored and move on when the next new thing comes out.

I'm already seeing this in my local Rust community as the chronically online people are moving on to Zig now. They even use one of the Rust discords to advertise their Zig meetups and proselytize about Zig at every opportunity. Eventually they'll get bored and move on.

> > That being said, there is an overwhelming force in the Rust community that when anyone mentions they're having problems with Rust the language on a fundamental level, the answer is "you just don't get it yet, I promise once you get good enough things will make sense".

I don't fully agree with this assessment. In my experience, Rust community members who arrive with well thought out complaints or suggestions are welcomed by the people who like working on programming language fundamentals. You can nerd snipe a lot of Rust enthusiasts by showing up with a difficult problem involving tricky parts of Rust, which will often result in some creative solutions and discussions.

On the other hand, Rust communities are inundated with people trying to write Rust as if it was their old favorite language. I've spent a lot of time trying to get people to unlearn habits from other languages and try to adopt the Rust way of doing things. Some people refuse to let go of paradigms once they've used them for years, so doing things the Rust way isn't going to work for them. I've worked with enough people who spent more time fighting against Rust than trying to adopt Rust ways of doing things that I've also reached the point where I don't engage once I see the conversation going that way. Can't please everyone.