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Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

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Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#771

Post by flohofwoe »

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.

Interfaces or traits are not ECS though. ECS is mostly concerned about how data is layed out in memory for efficient processing. The composability is (more or less) just a nice side effect.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#772

Post by bjourne »

paulddraper wrote: post #534
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.

Go is infamous for its gc latency spikes, which is the thing that games cannot tolerate. Though 1.18 helped a lot, you'd have to do some major persuasion to game devs that Go's gc is the kind of thing they'd want in their game. --- EDIT: Not sure the downvote, Go is know for its (historically at least) unsuitability for RTC or game dev.

Your comment is down voted because it is false. Go is not "infamous" for gc latency spikes.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#773

Post by pmarreck »

I've always been fascinated by games and I've always loved programming but except for the beginning I've never combined the two. And the issue with game dev and functional languages not seeming to jive with each other always seemed (from the outside) to mostly be one of established norms conflicting with each other on both sides. I'd love to have time to explore this; for example one complaint the author makes is about passing around the game state but then also needing to pass around sub-parts of it and Rust complaining; this would be trivial or a non-problem in Elixir, but I know that's because there's no mutable state and in Rust's case it must deal with mutable state regions because all of game dev assumes that's available (or it must be by necessity for performance reasons).

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#774

Post by drogus »

lelanthran wrote: post #674
StressedDev wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is we would have a lot less games and the games we would get would not be as fun. Rust appears to have the following problems: 1) As the article pointed out, game developers are less productive in Rust. This is a huge problem. 2) Game budgets are not going to get bigger. This means that if Rust reduces productivity, games are going to be less polished, less fun, etc. if they are written in Rust. 3) Game q…

> 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.

Have you written much Rust?

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#775

Post by VS1999 »

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…

>spent the past decade mostly ranting about Rust and working to make a perfect game programming language, instead of making games.

I wish. As far as I can tell he made a single hour long video shitting on rust and now he's the enemy of the cult. That's hardly spending the last decade sitting being mad over rust.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#777

Post by 0dayz »

This article hits every note of frustration I've gotten with rust.

It honestly feels that if you want a somewhat memory safe language for more general purpose use cases good'ol fashion Ada or maybe ziggs (or if carbon ever become a thing) seem 100% more approachable than rust for gamedev or gui.

The only way I see rust becoming dominant in gamedev/ui is by sheer brute force.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#778

Post by flohofwoe »

dimitrios1 wrote: post #536
kibwen wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd expected some AAA title to be written in Rust by now. I'm disinclined to believe that any AAA game will be written in Rust (one is free to insert "because Rust's gamedev ecosystem is immature" or "because AAA game development is increasingly conservative and risk-averse" at their discretion), yet I'm curious what led you to believe this. C++ became available in 1985, and didn't become popular for gamedev until…

Comparing the time it takes for a prog language to spread from the 80s to today is a bad vantage point. Stuff took much longer to bake back then -- but even so the point is moot, as other commentors pointed out, it took off roughly the same amount of time between 2015 and today.

Hmm I don't agree. We're far away from the frantic hardware and software progress in the 80s and 90s. Especially in software development it feels like we're running in circles (but very, very fast!) since the early 2000's, and things that took just a few months or at most 2..3 years in the 80s or 90s to mature take a decade or more now.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#779

Post by JanisErdmanis »

neonsunset wrote: post #631
philosopher1234 wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve heard that go has very low latency gc, i haven’t heard of it having spikes

The problem with Go is its inadequate FFI, which is important for gamedev which tends to be FFI and syscall-heavy due to embedding another gamescript language and/or calling into underlying rendering back-end, sometimes interacting with input drivers directly, etc. Which is why C# has been chosen so often (it has performance not much worse than C++ (you can manually optimize to match it), zero or almost zero-cost FFI…

The overhead for Go in benchmarks is insane in contrast to other languages - https://github.com/dyu/ffi-overhead Are there reasons why Go does not copy what Julia does?

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#780

Post by zozbot234 »

resonious wrote: post #678

This author is done more serious Rust code than I have, but I wonder: why not just abuse `clone`, `unwrap`, `Arc`, or even `transmute`? Rust does try to force you to refactor sometimes, but you have the option to fight back.

It's possible to abuse 'transmute' but .clone(), .unwrap(), Arc are full-blown language features, so using them is not 'abuse' of any kind. They're part of how Rust supports quick iterative development, along with Any (for dynamic objects with downcast) and still others.
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