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Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

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Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#981

Post by baby »

metaltyphoon wrote: post #910
baby wrote: post #885

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open 5 libs.rs, which crate are you in? Always look at full path instead of filename. A mod.rs means a much more cleaner organization, as you know that all of a folder module's content is within that module, and you don't have to look elsewhere.

Yes this would be a problem if for every module you had to create a lib.rs, which is not the case. mod.rs has a much higher # of occurrences.

I’ve worked in plenty of codebases that were split in many crates, not many folder modules

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#982

Post by sesm »

bmitc wrote: post #952
sesm wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversations that people have in science and engineering are more analytical and pessimistic, where they try to clarify and set the boundaries. This is the opposite of creative and optimistic conversation, where you break boundaries between things to create something new. The attitude to be analytical in conversations comes from the fact, that software engineers usually do creative part of their work alone, and use…

There are many different ways to solve problems. Having tunnel vision will exclude most of them. Critical thought has its place in any field, but many scientists and engineers will hide behind so called analytical thought when in reality, the ideas are more biased than they'd like to admit.

I think problem solving has analytical and creative parts too. Like in Polya's 'How to Solve It' you have clear analytical steps in the beginning (what's known, what's unknown, etc), then 'Boom! Heuristic!', then again analytical steps for reflecting back on the solution (corner cases, did you use all the inputs, etc).

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#983

Post by masfoobar »

Animats wrote: post #137

That's a good article. He's right about many things. I've been writing a metaverse client in Rust for several years now. Works with Second Life and Open Simulator servers. Here's some video.[1] It's about 45,000 lines of safe Rust. Notes: * There are very few people doing serious 3D game work in Rust. There's Veloren, and my stuff, and maybe a few others. No big, popular titles. I'd expected some AAA title to be writ…

> I'd expected some AAA titles to be written in Rust by now.

"AAA" titles are huge and/or high dev budgets. Even if a game is "starting from scratch" the engine development team are still likely taking code from previous projects to get started. Of course there are other factors. It could be a BIG RISK to move to another programming language when the team, despite frustrations, are already familiar with something else... like the perks C++ brings (you learn from trial-and-error)

Could you imagine learning Rust as-you-go... building a AAA title... and fighting the compiler? To me it is a huge risk!

That is my opinion.. but I am sure others will disagree. If there is anyone on (or did) a AAA title with Rust... I would be happy to hear more about it.

I am not saying it will never happen. Maybe a AAA title is currently in development in Rust. I honestly dont know. However, game developers... if they are looking into Rust... are also looking at Odin, Jai, or Zig. For gaming, I think they are better alternatives than Rust but (again) that is my opinion.

Now for smaller, indie games - the possibility of moving to Rust (or another language) is more likely. Likely a fair percentage have moved away from C++ now.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#984

Post by masfoobar »

kibwen wrote: post #221
Animats wrote: post #137

That's a good article. He's right about many things. I've been writing a metaverse client in Rust for several years now. Works with Second Life and Open Simulator servers. Here's some video.[1] It's about 45,000 lines of safe Rust. Notes: * There are very few people doing serious 3D game work in Rust. There's Veloren, and my stuff, and maybe a few others. No big, popular titles. I'd expected some AAA title to be writ…

> 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…

> and didn't become popular for gamedev until the turn of the millenium

Wasn't this also because Microsoft had terrible support for C?

Since the mid-90's, a number of gamedevs moved to C++ but were unhappy with the results.. how OOP works, exception handling, the STL, etc.

My understanding is.. by late 90's.. many game developers, despite using C++, we still coding more inline with C programming than (proper) C++.

Mostly C code but using some features of C++ like, functions inside a struct, or using namespaces, that did not sacrifice compilation and runtime speed.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#985

Post by iknowstuff »

alimnes wrote: post #640
iknowstuff wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://dioxuslabs.com/blog/release-050 Seems promising, very React-esque with little boilerplate

Development speed is many times lower than with Typescript frameworks, while the result is not faster or significantly more stable. Why should anyone choose Dioxus over Sveltekit, Next or Nuxt? I never had an issue with a frontend app that the borrow checker would have catched. Error handling was an issues some years ago but is solved by now when using one of those modern frameworks. (I don't know if Dioxus has error…

Idk maybe when you can’t target web.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#986

Post by Silphendio »

antifa wrote: post #954
fmbb wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is a different story for game engines, renderers, physics, audio, asset loaders etc. those are much closer to system programming but this is also not where we usually spend the most time, as a professional you're supposed to either use off-the-shelf engines or already made frameworks and libraries. But this is where industry interest (the little there is) lies for Rust, is it not? This is what the AAA studios th…

> visual scripting languages I'm surprised no one has made such a language that is designed from the ground up to be used as such for rust. Nim/coffeescript come to mind, but they target non-rust languages. Lua would be close enough if it weren't so alien to everything people like about rust.

Someone did actually create a scripting language specifically designed to work with rust: https://rhai.rs/

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#987

Post by codethief »

croutons wrote: post #948
codethief wrote: post #814

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, many (non-game dev) Rust projects I have seen/used do provide great user experience precisely because they are laser-focused on performance and have blown existing alternatives out of the water. (Think ripgrep, fzf, etc.) Prototyping is certainly necessary but it shouldn't be at the cost of runtime performance – at least not too much –, because it will typically be very difficult to improve performance af…

Fzf is written in go fwiw

Oops, looks like I misremembered. :) Thanks!

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#988

Post by RobKohr »

Thank you for this. I have been having some engine indecision. I am more of a programmer, so I was thinking that learning rust and bevy would be superior to learning godot, but it seemed like a really deep rabbit hole to go down, and I was concerned from the lack of actual games that were coming out of it.

Your blog post really explained the reason why quite clearly, thus eliminating a journey that would be fraught with difficulty and seemingly with little return.

I am going to go with godot and hopefully that works out for me. Thank you again for sharing your experience.

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#989

Post by durante_a »

flohofwoe wrote: post #768
hamilyon2 wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hope that C++ evolves with gamedev and they become more and more symbiotic. Maybe adoption of rust by gamedev community isn't the best thing to wish to happen to language. Maybe it is better to let other crowd to steer evolution of rust, letting system programming and gamedev drift apart

I think I don't know a single gamdev who's fond of "modern C++" or even the C++ stdlib in general (and stdlib changes is what most of "modern C++" is about). the last good version was basically C++11. In general the C++ committee seems to be largely disconnected from reality (especially now that Google seems to be doing its own C++ successor, but even before, Google's requirements are entirely different from gamedev…

Hi, I'm a game developer and I'm fond of "modern C++" and the stdlib. Sure, I would like some priorities to be different (i.e. we should have had static reflection a while ago), but it's still moving in the right direction.

Particularly the idea that "the last good version was basically C++11" is exactly what I would expect to hear from someone who reads a few edgy articles on the internet but has no actual in-depth experience working with the language. C++14 and 17 are, for a large part, plain ergonomic upgrades over C++11, with lots of minor but impactful additions and improvements all over. I can't even think of anything in those two versions that would be sufficiently controversial to make anyone prefer C++11 over them, or call it the "last good version".

C++20 is obviously a larger step, and does include a few more controversial changes, but those are completely optional (and I don't expect many of them to be widely adopted in gamedev for a decade at least, even though for some I wish it went more quickly).

Re: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

#990

Post by brooke2k »

myaccountonhn wrote: post #966
fire_lake wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OCaml could be that language. I’m not convinced that ecosystem is so important for game dev. Once you have a simple graphics library, bindings to BulletPhyiscs etc most of the code is custom simulation code with no integrations needed.

I can echo OCaml. It is probably the most underrated language imo. It has great compilation times, macros, type inference, good tooling. With few exceptions, the library ecosystem doesn’t suffer from the same overengineering issues as Haskell and types are kept relatively simple. It has simple runtime characteristics making it easy to optimize performance when needed, although it tends to be very fast in general.

last I used OCaml, the standard library situation was abysmal (compared to say Haskell's), and you had to go searching for third-party "batteries included" crates to cover simple stuff. Has that gotten any better the last few years?
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