Congrats on the game launch. Funny way to promote it. Good luck, hope you get some sales!
Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years
701–710 of 996 posts
Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years
#702Earlier quoted context omitted.
> modern C++ is essentially as safe as Rust This isn't even close to being true. I think memory safety isn't as important for games as it is for most software (though it is still quite important for multiplayer games!). But even if you write the most modern C++ possible I guarantee you are going to spend some of your time debugging segfaults, memory corruption and heisenbugs. Don't try and claim "I don't write bugs".…
That assertion was specifically qualified in the context of database engines, for which it is true. I definitely write bugs but I haven't seen a segfault or memory corruption in years. That is more of a C thing than a C++ thing. It is kind of difficult to have a segfault or memory corruption with explicitly paged object memory, since there can't be any pointers and these complex objects are bound-checked at compile-t…
So you're saying if you write your database engine in C++ you're not going to see any segfaults?
https://jira.mariadb.org/browse/MDEV-14248?jql=text%20~%20%2...
Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years
#703Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As the article pointed out, game developers are less productive in Rust. This is a huge problem. I don't think it's limited to just game developers though. Unless you are writing something in which any GC time other than 0ns is a dealbreaker, and any bug is also a dealbreaker, you're going to be less productive in Rust than almost any other language.
Oh, come on, we're yet again extrapolating from "Rust is bad at rapid iteration on an indie game" to "Rust is bad at everything". If Rust were really that astoundingly unproductive of a language, then so many developers at organizations big and small wouldn't be using it. Our industry may be irrational at times, but it's not that irrational.
> Oh, come on, we're yet again extrapolating from "Rust is bad at rapid iteration on an indie game" to "Rust is bad at everything".
I am saying that Rust development has a lower velocity than mainstream GC'ed languages (Java, C#, Go, whatever).
I didn't think that you are disputing this claim; if you are disputing this, I'd like to know why you think otherwise.
Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years
#704There are vanishingly few reasons why anyone wouldn't use a garbage collected language in modern software. I think a lot of the people using rust haven't realised how much this limits its utility. As a result of this, the language has been presented as much more widely applicable than it actually is.
Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years
#705Earlier quoted context omitted.
I shall recommend this talk for you https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc
Funny how at the end of the talk a senior looking guy asks him, “Why not just use C?” and the speaker basically admits that that would be his choice but for “cultural” reasons.
And then he went to work for Unity on HPC#, the C# Burst compiler toolchain.
Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years
#706Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. Especially given that Rust is an immediate upgrade with no downsides when moving away from C or C++. It is easy to see with people never wanting to go back, which also involves getting companies and products to adopt it as you would otherwise be forced by the market to work with inferior tools. As a counterexample, .NET suffers a lot from the lack of evangelism - big chunk of comm…
I mean, if we are allowed to lie in order to promote Rust, why don't we just smear all the C/C++ code bases in the world as security hazard needed to be sorted out ASAP? Unless we already do...
I doubt security is the matter everyone is concerned with but rather the quality of tooling and developer experience.
It is, of course, difficult to convey to developers who only experienced C and C++ build systems, or Ruby tooling and brittleness, or Python way of managing dependencies, or setting up the packaging when using Java, that fast and easy to use solutions do not come from trade-offs but from just better ways of doing so - using cargo and Rust or dotnet and C# is night and day difference compared to options listed above.
I said it here in the past and will say it again: it's not that Rust (or .NET for that matter) are that good, it's a lot of other popular languages and platforms are that bad at one or another aspect (or many at the same time), that make it sufficiently painful to never tolerate a downgrade when you worked with a tool that offers better all-around experience.
Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years
#707This is a very brave post to write given how incendiary responses to rust criticism can be, but this matches my experience entirely.
> incendiary responses to rust criticism can be I've not experienced this. Do you have examples of the rust community flaming someone for having negative opinions about the language?
Not parent, but take a look at these:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32117148
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39641552
These threads are absolutely painful to read. The Rust community/leadership would not do anything about it because Rust thrives on such "devotion".
Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years
#708Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish Microsoft had any direction on the 'way of the future' for native apps on Windows
If they did publish a “way of the future” direction, would you believe them? Fool me N times then shame on them, fool me N+1 times, then shame on me sort of thing.
I'd have bought into MAUI if there was Linux support in the box.
Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years
#709Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Go is an engineer’s language. No, Ada/Spark is an example of a good engineers language. Go is a mediocre effort at best. Rob Pikes defence is that it was designed for junior Googlers who "aren't capable of understanding a brilliant language". Yes that's a real quote.
What’s a brilliant language in this context
Apparently anything that offers a type system beyond Go's.
Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years
#710When I set out to learn Rust about a decade ago, I chose to write a game - a clone of "Empire" that I call Umpire. It's a different task to re-implement an already-designed language rather than designing and implementing at the same time. Nevertheless I have run into a number of the difficulties mentioned in the article, and arrived at my own solutions - foremost passing around global UUIDs rather than actual `&` ref…
> Rust's strength in ML
Most of ML frameworks that I know are implemented in Python and C++. I tried looking at ML in Rust a few years ago and didn't find anything useful. Has it changed?