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Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

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Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#561

Post by collinvandyck76 »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #413
matheusmoreira wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

The current popularity of the async stuff has its roots in the classic "c10k" problem. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C10k_problem ) A perception among some that threads are expensive, especially when "wasted" on blocking I/O. And that using them in that domain "won't scale." Putting aside that not all of use are building web applications (heterodox here in HN, I know)... Most people in the real world with real appl…

>now you're having to fire up a tokio runtime

I've been developing in (mostly async) Rust professionally for a about a year -- I haven't written much sync rust other than my learning projects and a raytracer I'm working on, but what are the kind of common dependencies that pose this problem? Like wanting to use reqwest or things like that?

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#562

Post by Dylan16807 »

alcover wrote: post #369
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), i…

Seeing presence/absence of semicolons in the list of primary features makes me wary.

And it takes a lot of people to make good tooling.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#563

Post by treyd »

DarkNova6 wrote: post #88
popcar2 wrote: post #46

> Rust gamedev ecosystem lives on hype I've been saying this for years. I've tried to get into Rust multiple times the past few years and one of the things I've tried was gamedev with Rust (specifically the library ggez when it was still being worked on, and a little bit of Bevy). I admittedly never got far, but I gave it a solid shot. My experience was instantly terrible. Slow compile times and iterations, huge pack…

Just a small addition: Godot also has great C# support. It is a real charm to work with.

The godot-rust project crates take a minor amount of adaptation to understand how it exposes the Godot object system in Rust but it's also pretty well developed.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#564

Post by kbenson »

mrkeen wrote: post #247
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,…

> My priorities are reasonable performances and the fastest iteration time possible. I bought Mount & Blade II Bannerlord in 2020-03-30. I love it to death, but come on... // 2024-02-01 $ curl https://www.taleworlds.com/en/News/552 | grep "Fixed a crash that" | wc -l 29 // 2023-12-21 $ curl https://www.taleworlds.com/en/News/549 | grep "Fixed a crash that" | wc -l 6 // 2023-12-14 $ curl https://www.taleworlds.com/en/…

I can't really comment on the quality of the game or experience or how buggy it feels because I've never played it, but I will say that counting fixed crash situations is a somewhat arbitrary and useless metric. If each of those crashes affected and was reported by a single person or even nobody because no regular person could really encounter it is a vastly different situation than if each of those crashes was experienced by even 1% of the users.

The criteria by which something is decided to mention in the patch notes is not always purely because the users care. Sometimes it's because the developers want to signal effort to user and/or upper management.

Maybe Mount and Blade was super boggy in the past and is still super buggy now so all the crashes fixed are just an indicator of how large the problem is for them and how bad the code still is. I dunno, you didn't really give any information to help on that front.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#565

Post by lugu »

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…

The author is asking for a "give me a break" feature. I would say that in a strongly typed functional language, this is akin to mutating objects. The author seems to wish for an unsafe option to locally turn off the borrower check. Is it something Rust could not offer?

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#566

Post by remram »

hot_gril wrote: post #496
kagakuninja wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OOP kind of goes out the window when people start using entity component systems. Of course, like the author, I'm not sure I'll need ECS since I'm not building a AAA game.

Had to look up ECS to be honest, and it's pretty much what I already do in general dev. I don't care to classify things, I care what I can do with something. Which is Rust's model.

Sorry I got lost in that sentence. What is Rust's model?

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#567

Post by kbenson »

pcwalton wrote: post #293
popcar2 wrote: post #46

> Rust gamedev ecosystem lives on hype I've been saying this for years. I've tried to get into Rust multiple times the past few years and one of the things I've tried was gamedev with Rust (specifically the library ggez when it was still being worked on, and a little bit of Bevy). I admittedly never got far, but I gave it a solid shot. My experience was instantly terrible. Slow compile times and iterations, huge pack…

> And my other biggest problem is that they keep painting other non-Rust things as being fundamentally flawed for not being Rust. "It's not memory safe" is the biggest one thrown around, but when was the last time memory safety was actually a big problem in games? Unity uses C# which is garbage collected, Godot uses its own scripting language which makes it nigh impossible to leak memory, Unreal AFAIK has its own too…

> but the ability of engines like Bevy to analyze system dependencies and automatically scale to multiple CPUs is a big deal

Is it? The article addresses that, and basically calls it a pointless feature that is almost never used and when it is the benefits are mostly lost because of real world needs and constraints, and that the problems it solves are easier solved through other solutions and add-on systems that are well understood.

I think this might be a case where explaining the real-world benefit instead of the theoretical benefit is needed, if only to counter what are very pointed criticisms that are definitely deeper than at the theoretical level.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#568

Post by Dylan16807 »

chimen wrote: post #522
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You were flagged for no such thing. You were flagged for a pointless quip about "woke"ness. Other people repeated more civil and reasonably argued forms of your same point about the language and its community and received no such downvotes. No need to play martyr.

[flagged]

If you blame the wrong reason for downvotes, expect to be corrected. Your complaint here is invalid.

Try criticizing Rust next time, if you want to demonstrate that criticizing Rust gets downvotes. You were throwing out insults in your very first comment.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#569

Post by Dylan16807 »

obdev wrote: post #190
chimen wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I said above, cult-like. They will swiftly call you names if you even dare to question their beliefs. Thank you for proving me right kind sir.

Your post is "flagged" to oblivion, just like my earlier post questioning the "inclusive" culture of the Rust community. What is it called when a person or group's actions don't match their words?

> Your post is "flagged" to oblivion

Personally, I think downvoting insults is more inclusive than not downvoting insults.

> just like my earlier post

You made an entire submission asking users of a specific programming language to defend themselves.

It's a bad HN submission.

Flagging it is neither inclusive nor uninclusive. It's just marking it as a bad submission.

How do those actions fail to match words? What words do you have in mind?

Also the HN users that flagged it probably don't even use Rust.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#570

Post by 0x457 »

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.

I speculate that they wanted to support just `mod.rs`, but because VS Code became the editor for rust people hated seeing all tabs named `mod.rs`.
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