Comment by mikhmha

Interesting read! If I had not picked Elixir + Godot for the multiplayer game I'm making, then I would've gone with Rust for the whole thing. The old naive version of me would've tried doing it in C++ + Unreal but I knew better this time around.

I think multiplayer game devs are sleeping on Elixir! It has made the network side of things so much easier and intuitive with fast prototyping and built in monitoring - so many lifetime issues are easily found and addressed. I'm pairing Elixir with Godot, Godot is used for the frontend game client. And its crazy because I thought the game client part would be the "hard" part as it would be a new skillset to learn, but Godot makes the actual game part very easy. GDScript is easy to learn, and the way Godot uses "signals" is very similar to the backend code in Elixir with message passing so its not a huge cognitive shift to switch between server/client code.

I get that BEAM doesn't lend well to highly computational tasks, but I just don't see how thats an issue for many types of multiplayer games? If you aren't making some crazy simulation game, then most of the backend computation is more around managing client state and doing "accounting" every tick as inputs are processed. The most computational task I've had is server-side NPC Pathfinding, which I was able to quickly offload onto seperate processes that chug along at their own rhythm.