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Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

loglog.games

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Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#551

Post by metaltyphoon »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #180
baby wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO it’s not opinionated enough. Golang for example doesn’t let you customize go fmt, while Rust does. Rust also has many ways to do things in general (mod.rs vs name_of_folder.rs for example) and seems to not want to provide a useful baseline for most projects via its standard library (unlike Golang). But to go back to our subject: Rust is a great language and that’s all you need. I wish I could use it with unity.

The mod vs folder rs stuff is just embarrassing for Rust. I have no idea why they support more then 1 method.

The do it because the first one sucked ass and the second is a huge improvement but you still have to support the old way.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#552

Post by Zambyte »

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,…

I know you're not asking for recommendations, but Lisp, particularly SBCL, really seems to check all your boxes. I say this as someone who generally reaches for Scheme when it comes to Lisps too.

There are a few game engines[0] for CL, but most of them seem to be catered specifically to 2D games.

[0] https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl?tab=readme-ov-fil...

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#553

Post by [deleted] »

mrkeen wrote: post #86

> As far as a game is concerned, there is only one audio system, one input system, one physics world, one deltaTime, one renderer, one asset loader. I thought this way when I was doing Java dev around 10 years ago. I thought it excused the singleton pattern. I was wrong! You should always be able to construct an object by explicitly passing dependencies to it. Especially for testing. It really is no fun if your rende…

[deleted]

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#554

Post by yesuk »

qweqwe14 wrote: post #488
TheRoque wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a weird concept to "care about programming". Same as "inadequate code". I find this statement really condescending and completely confirms some of the cliché quotes that the author write in this article

By "care about programming" I basically mean writing maintainable code. By "inadequate code" I mean code that does what the author wants at this point in time, but is completely unmaintainable and just bad. Sloppy practices, etc

Some people "care about shipping a product" others "care about programming".

That is why virtually no videogame is made with Rust.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#555

Post by TulliusCicero »

gridspy wrote: post #513
TulliusCicero wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, I almost find it the opposite right now. Learning the engine is a pain in the ass -- it's not particularly hard, just tedious to learn all the APIs and quirks -- and then when you're initially building the thing, "it's not fun yet" for a quite a while. But then once you have the fundamentals down, you can add more abilities and characters and other features, that's the fun shit. I was working on the AI l…

I think the period between having a playable alpha and a polished release is the part people hate. Or just grinding out content to make the game longer. I hope you enjoy the process and succeed as a game dev.

Thanks!

Right now, the idea of creating new content being "grinding" baffles me, but that's as a hobbyist developer of course. I'm sure I'd feel different if I was in a big company doing it.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#556

Post by astrange »

kazinator wrote: post #543
astrange wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Probably because there's so many more of them. Maybe because being called not a real UNIX programmer feels different from being called a Blub programmer.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#557

Post by QuadrupleA »

astrange wrote: post #395
Xeamek wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is actively developing his new game in parallel to creating the language. Not to mention smaller projects like 'Braid- anniversary edition'.

Isn't the traditional advice that if you try to write both a game engine and a game that you'll get neither?

Braid and The Witness, his last two games, both used custom engines written in C++.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#558

Post by jltsiren »

fooker wrote: post #515
jltsiren wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No language from Apple / Google / Microsoft / whatever can ever be a serious replacement for C++. When the development of the language is dominated by a single entity, the risk that the interests of that entity override those of other users is simply too high. Vendor-specific languages are fine, if you are developing something for that vendor's ecosystem. But if you don't want to lock your code to a specific ecosyste…

I don't disagree. Pragmatic considerations tend to win over ideological ones though. Consider Java's success.

I was thinking more about pragmatic issues, and Java is a good example of them. It's a widely used language, but it's also a huge failure.

25 years ago, Java was supposed to be the new general-purpose language you could use for everything. Universities rushed to teach it to everyone. There was a lot of initial success, but then Java started losing ground. The direction the language was going was not good for many applications. And then lawyers got involved, which didn't help.

C++ is a general-purpose language. It's widely used, because it's widely used. The language is good enough for many tasks, and you can probably find the libraries you need and people familiar with the language. If you work in a niche with no specific reasons to use a particular language, C++ is often a good choice.

Rust is not there yet, because it's a new language with limited library support. But it does have momentum. The biggest threat to Rust as a general-purpose language is probably async. When there are strong interests to develop the language and the ecosystem for specific applications, other niches often suffer.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#559

Post by lakomen »

Yup. Rust is too complicated. You don't think about getting the job done, you think about language specific crap that is just overhead. And it's ugly to look at.

I tried to like it, but I can't. It doesn't align with my way of thinking.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#560

Post by treyd »

dboreham wrote: post #484
zamalek wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. Async/await typically improves headroom (scalability) at the cost of latency and throughput. It may also make code easier to reason about.

Definitely makes code harder to reason about.

If you were to write the same code without using async you'd be trudging through a mess of callbacks and combinators. This is what writing futures code before 2018 was like. It was doable if you needed the perf but it sucked. Async is a huge improvement to readability and reasoning that we didn't have before.
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