Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years • Hacker News Board

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#541

Post by belinder » Sat, Apr 27, 2024, 1:05 AM UTC

110bpm wrote: post #509

nu11ptr wrote: post #19

As much as I love Rust I sometimes wonder if I'd be more productive in a simpler language. If I wrote it every day I'm not sure that would be true, but as a hobbyist coming back to Rust sometimes takes me a bit to get back in the zone. Also, still not a fan of async, as it is woefully incomplete and fairly complicated in some use cases. That said, I just can't go back to Go with nil pointers and lack of decent enums/…

For me, the closest language currently is F#. The open-source ecosystem is not as massive as Go's or the JVM's, but it's not niche either. F# runs on .NET and works with all .NET packages (C#, F#, ...). If the .NET ecosystem can work out for you, I recommend taking a closer look at F#. F# allows for simple code, which is "functional" by default, but you're still free to write imperative, "side-effectful" code, too. I…

Do you know of or have any shareable (sample) projects implemented in your way of doing F#? It sounds very intriguing to me

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#542

Post by samatman » Sat, Apr 27, 2024, 1:08 AM UTC

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…

Why should he be making more games, instead of building his vision of a perfect language?

A machinist who retires from running lathes and goes into the lathe-making business has reached the pinnacle of that profession.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#543

Post by kazinator » Sat, Apr 27, 2024, 1:09 AM UTC

astrange wrote: post #402

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd go read their mailing list and Reddit forms; especially when people run into issues doing stuff that's very simple in other languages. Never seen a more toxic programming community. Hopefully they calm down, or really get drown out, once there are a real number of jobs for people using Rust. Right now the evangelists outnumber the rank and file who are just using a language to get work done.

If it helps, they can't possibly be as toxic as Lisp programmers used to be, where more or less any online conversation would start with someone new asking a question and Erik Naggum replying that they were a moron who should die.

Why is it that, say, C programmers, as such, don't get painted according to what has historically gone on in the comp.lang.c newsgroup?

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#544

Post by retrocryptid » Sat, Apr 27, 2024, 1:11 AM UTC

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'm happy to see someone still doing some work in second life.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#545

Post by neonsunset » Sat, Apr 27, 2024, 1:12 AM UTC

celdon25 wrote: post #301

hi-v-rocknroll wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Gamedev industry already settled on almost perfect language for this task (C#) so there is little profit in trying to reinvent the wheel.

And by perfect I mean not the way Unity uses it but the way pure C# engines use it.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#546

Post by davidalayachew » Sat, Apr 27, 2024, 1:14 AM UTC

celdon25 wrote: post #286

LarsDu88 wrote: post #79

I've done hobby gamedev in Bevy/Rust, Godot/C#, and Unity C#. It's honestly somewhat baffling to me that folks will choose Rust for gamedev right now. The state of the open sourced tools are just not there yet, especially when compared to Godot, and at the same time these games are running on PC hardware which tends to get faster every year. Also for ECS... one thing I tended to realize is that when developing a game…

> I think about Starcraft from 1998, created when virtually all PCs only had one core, and its 200 unit per faction cap. Blizzard hasn't increased this cap because it doesn't necessarily make the game more fun. Ah... Starcraft. It's 200 supply per player (hero units take 0 supply, zerglings are 0.5, and the supply cost goes up to 8 for battlecruisers for example). The limit is enforced when building a unit from a bui…

Complete distraction of a question -- for that video clip, what is the song playing at the time stamp you selected? Is that in-game music? I figure not.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#547

Post by brundolf » Sat, Apr 27, 2024, 1:14 AM UTC

This is a fantastic article. Thorough, nuanced, well-articulated, and rooted in lots of real experience

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#548

Post by samatman » Sat, Apr 27, 2024, 1:14 AM UTC

lastgeniusua wrote: post #198

> The most fundamental issue is that the borrow checker forces a refactor at the most inconvenient times. Rust users consider this to be a positive, because it makes them "write good code", but the more time I spend with the language the more I doubt how much of this is true. Good code is written by iterating on an idea and trying things out, and while the borrow checker can force more iterations, that does not mean…

This is the opposite of my experience with other strongly typed languages. They're easier to refactor, because when you change the types, say you delete a field, everywhere that field was used is a compile error. Clean them up and on your way.

The borrow checker is an entirely different beast. People forget that safe Rust allows a subset of programs. Finding the subset which does what you want can range from easy, to hair-pullingly gnarly, to provably impossible.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#549

Post by pcwalton » Sat, Apr 27, 2024, 1:14 AM UTC

TheRoque wrote: post #441

pcwalton wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Bevy has the advantage of being built using the "right way" from the start. This makes an enormous difference in the ease of hacking on rendering code. Ironically, the main thing holding Bevy back is the bickering at the W3C. WebGPU is still not widely supported, so we have to support WebGL 2 (with reduced functionality in some cases), and that adds a lot of complexity.

> Bevy has the advantage of being built using the "right way" from the start I think the article is precisely criticizing this type of comment... You make people believe that Bevy is some kind of safe bet for the future, that it took inspiration from the greatest to build even better foundations for a game engine... And it seems common in the Rust community: make audacious unverifiable claims to enroll other "believe…

I don't think anyone ever claimed that Bevy is finished.

As for audacious unverifiable claims: it's quite verifiable that Bevy never used DirectX 9, DirectX 10, shadow volumes, HLSL, Cg, Vulkan, or Metal (I'm not sure about OpenGL or GLSL; those were before I got involved with the project). It chose the better path (wgpu) early on. That's all I was saying.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#550

Post by ClimaxGravely » Sat, Apr 27, 2024, 1:15 AM UTC

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.

Often in the past Lua has been used and in my experience it's been quite nice. It's very easy to bind, there's some nice editors out there and the performance is decent.

There's some other game-specific scripting languages that have popped up (angelscript and wren come to mind but there's more). I've not used them in full production products though. Mostly just kicked the tires.

Now that I think about it though, it's been almost 6 years since I've worked on an engine with lua support. Mainly because in the last few years I've been working with unity or unreal.