Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years • Hacker News Board

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#91

Post by candiddevmike » Fri, Apr 26, 2024, 6:46 PM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #49

HL33tibCe7 wrote: post #3

> The problem you're having is only a problem because you haven't tried hard enough. You just need to read another 50,000 word fasterthanlime essay. Then you'll not have problems any more. > That being said, there is an overwhelming force in the Rust community that when anyone mentions they're having problems with Rust the language on a fundamental level, the answer is "you just don't get it yet, I promise once you g…

Parts of the Rust community are toxic indeed, but I've been around long enough to recognize the same pattern in communities of other hot programming languages or frameworks in their up-and-coming phase. There's something about the new hot language/framework/paradigm that always attracts the type of people who wrap their identity up in the hot new thing. They take any criticisms of their new favorite thing as criticis…

> What I see now in certain Rust communities feels a lot like what I saw in Golang communities in the early days. I had similar experiences when React was the new kid on the block, too.

Go was released in 2012, Rust in 2015. Are you saying we are still in the early days of Rust?

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#92

Post by Dalewyn » Fri, Apr 26, 2024, 6:46 PM UTC

HL33tibCe7 wrote: post #3

> The problem you're having is only a problem because you haven't tried hard enough. You just need to read another 50,000 word fasterthanlime essay. Then you'll not have problems any more. > That being said, there is an overwhelming force in the Rust community that when anyone mentions they're having problems with Rust the language on a fundamental level, the answer is "you just don't get it yet, I promise once you g…

>> The problem you're having is only a problem because you haven't tried hard enough.

>You just need to read another 50,000 word fasterthanlime essay. Then you'll not have problems any more.

I'm reminded of a line from Hachiman in Oregairu: "Something is only a problem when someone makes it a problem."

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#93

Post by margorczynski » Fri, Apr 26, 2024, 6:46 PM UTC

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/…

> I just can't go back to Go with nil pointers and lack of decent enums/ADTs/pattern matching either.

Go is simply a badly designed language where the idea of "simplicity" has been maligned and proven bad ideas likes nil/null, exceptions and such have been introduced in a seemingly modern language. One would think that decades of Java, Javascript, etc. code blowing up because of this issues would teach someone something but seems that is not always the case.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#94

Post by sgt » Fri, Apr 26, 2024, 6:46 PM UTC

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/…

I mean.. Java is there. Java 23 is really interesting.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#95

Post by glonq » Fri, Apr 26, 2024, 6:47 PM UTC

Keyframe wrote: post #22

HL33tibCe7 wrote: post #3

> The problem you're having is only a problem because you haven't tried hard enough. You just need to read another 50,000 word fasterthanlime essay. Then you'll not have problems any more. > That being said, there is an overwhelming force in the Rust community that when anyone mentions they're having problems with Rust the language on a fundamental level, the answer is "you just don't get it yet, I promise once you g…

this reminds me of Lispen of ye olde.. wait untill it clicks, man!

Yeah, this hits hard. Despite being proficient in a bunch of languages in college, I could just never wrap my poor brain around Lisp.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#96

Post by wbl » Fri, Apr 26, 2024, 6:47 PM UTC

kleiba wrote: post #38

msla wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lisp is pretty normal if you're accustomed to, like, Python: It's a GC'd procedural language.

Haha, nice one! :-) (can only assume you're joking)

Some jokes are serious some serious statements are jokes. Perlis's epigrams are one example.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#97

Post by andrepd » Fri, Apr 26, 2024, 6:47 PM UTC

Legion wrote: post #15

api wrote: post #6

> Making a fun & interesting games is about rapid prototyping and iteration, Rust's values are everything but that I feel like this is the core of the author's frustration. Rust is a systems language. It's for writing tight fast C-like code but safely and with a much more powerful type system. The facilities you need to do this are somewhat at odds with what you want for rapid iteration. Seems like Rust was the wrong…

> Seems like Rust was the wrong tool for the job. Sure, but the problem is when you have a community around that tool that insists otherwise.

Can you please give an example of that? Rust is very much advertised as a systems programming language. Can't really blame people for using it and going "oh it's harder than go and python"...

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#98

Post by Scramblejams » Fri, Apr 26, 2024, 6:47 PM UTC

nu11ptr wrote: post #53

BoorishBears wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that just Swift/Kotlin?

The problem with languages is they don't compose. Iow, one missing feature needed automatically invalidates the language entirely. Swift is targeted at Apple platforms and cross platform is an after thought. Kotlin targets JVM and while it is cool in concept, I hate it as a user (and Kotlin native isn't near as mature). If were considering something else at this stage I'd probably put my time into F#, but even it has…

And if we're still talking about gamedev, F# would probably make the GC too sad.

(When are we getting a low latency collector in the CLR? But I digress...)

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#99

Post by Pannoniae » Fri, Apr 26, 2024, 6:47 PM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #49

HL33tibCe7 wrote: post #3

> The problem you're having is only a problem because you haven't tried hard enough. You just need to read another 50,000 word fasterthanlime essay. Then you'll not have problems any more. > That being said, there is an overwhelming force in the Rust community that when anyone mentions they're having problems with Rust the language on a fundamental level, the answer is "you just don't get it yet, I promise once you g…

Parts of the Rust community are toxic indeed, but I've been around long enough to recognize the same pattern in communities of other hot programming languages or frameworks in their up-and-coming phase. There's something about the new hot language/framework/paradigm that always attracts the type of people who wrap their identity up in the hot new thing. They take any criticisms of their new favorite thing as criticis…

"On the other hand, Rust communities are inundated with people trying to write Rust as if it was their old favorite language."

This is perfectly understandable if you view languages as tools. If the new tool can't do something the old one did, then you'll have questions about using it. A great example is inheritance - if inheritance is missing, that's a negative for me. I don't care about the philosophy, I just want to use the tool to produce programs better and faster. If it's missing features, that's a negative point.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#100

Post by rendaw » Fri, Apr 26, 2024, 6:47 PM UTC

I agree with a lot here, but I think the author is overplaying "get things done fast" or underplaying "stable, performant code". I like indie games, but I've played enough games that crashed if I look at them wrong or chug despite being low poly early 2000s things that I now hesitate to buy indie games. Some of the examples seemed like maybe rust was preventing a weird unexpected feedback or clobbering iteration state or whatever.

I don't think the author disagrees here and is mostly talking about awful runtime alternatives (refcell, etc) but I just wanted to say it for balance.