Comment by emporas
9 months ago
If there were only two programming languages in the whole world, just two, no more; one better fitted for OS kernels and one better fitted for game programming, which one would be considered a general purpose language?
I would argue, OS programming is definitely more general than game programming. Rust is great for OS related tasks, math, deep learning n other stuff, and maybe not so great at GUIs, or even bad at that, or just inconvenient as the article points out.
That means, it should be used for general stuff, and for programming games should be used a niche language, like Lua, Python etc. Especially for fast iteration and experimentation, break things and move lightning fast, typed languages are in disadvantage for sure, compared to untyped/weakly typed.
I would argue that OS kernel programming is actually a very specialized niche of software engineering; it demands near iron performance, fine control down bit level granularity, perfectly deterministic memory manipulation, flawless security and maintainability, and all at the same time. These are conflicting requirements and meeting them naturally spills over into decreased productivity, which is acceptable because OSes are well engineered and evolve over decades.
If C or Rust would not be available, you could still write your kernel in a well documented assembly dialect - some people still do - and then complete your OS userland in some garbage collected/interpreted/WASM abomination. But it's unlikely you could write Microsoft Word or a modern browser in assembly.
And this I think is true for games too, since, other than the performance requirement, they don't need the other features of Rust and are quite tolerant of failure. They also tend to be unwieldy beasts hard to design cleanly because the internal world simulation would become ever more complex, imposing weird data access patterns etc. If your online play code suddenly requires access to some internal "tank fuel" state, in C you would just pass the pointer and pray to the goods of rock and roll it's still valid at access time; a garbage collected language would at least give you that; but in Rust, you are looking at a complete refactoring of the entire "tank" module to make the new access pattern fit the ownership model.
As the post explains, this will kill quick iteration, which I think is a very general need of most programmers.