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Comment by pavlov

9 months ago

Also C++ could be adopted incrementally by C developers. You could use it as “C with classes”, or just use operator overloading to make vector math more tolerable, or whatever subset that you happened to like.

So there’s really three forces at play in making C++ the standard:

1) The Microsoft ecosystem. They literally stopped supporting C by not adopting the C99 standard in their compiler. If you wanted any modern convenience, you had to compile in C++ mode. New APIs like Direct3D were theoretically accessible from C (via COM) but in practice designed for C++.

2) Better compilers and more CPU cycles to spare. You could actually count on the compiler to do the right thing often enough.

3) Seamless gradual adoption for C developers.

Rust has a good compiler, but it lacks that big ticket ecosystem push and is not entirely trivial for C++ developers to adopt.

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pavlov

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pcwalton  9 months ago

I'd say Rust does have that big ticket ecosystem push. Microsoft has been embracing Rust lately, with things like official Windows bindings [1].

The bigger problem is just inertia: large game engines are enormous.

[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs

  • withinrafael  9 months ago

    Repo contributor here, just to curb some expectations a bit: it's one very smart guy (Kenny), his unpaid volunteer sidekick (me), and a few unpaid external contributors. (I'm trying to draw a line between those with and without commit access, hence all the edits.)

    There's no other internal or external Microsoft /support/ that I'm aware of. I wouldn't necessarily use it as a signal of the company's intentions at this time.

    That said, there are Microsoft folks working on the Rust compiler, toolchain, etc. side of things too. Maybe those are better indicators!

  • meheleventyone  9 months ago

    I'd say the inertia is far more social than codebase size related. Right now whilst there are pockets of interest there is no broader reason to switch. Bevy as the leading contender isn't going to magic it's way to being capable of shipping AAA titles unless a studio actually adopts it. I don't think it's actually shipped a commercially successful indie game yet.

    Also game engines emphatically don't have to be huge. Look at Balatro shipping on Love2d.

    • cableshaft  9 months ago

      > Also game engines emphatically don't have to be huge. Look at Balatro shipping on Love2d.

      Balatro convinced me that Love2D might be a good contender for my next small 2D game release. I had no idea you could integrate Steamworks or 2D shaders that looked that good into Love2D. And it seems to be very cross-platform, since Balatro released on pretty much every platform on day 1 (with some porting help from a third party developer it seems like).

      And since it's Lua based, I should be able to port a slightly simpler version of the game over to the Playdate console.

      I'm also considering Godot, though.

      2 replies →

  • jacobgorm  9 months ago

    So far I am way less productive in rust than in any language I've ever used for actual work, so to rewrite an entire game engine would seem like commercial suicide.

    • chromatin  9 months ago

      "so far" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there =)

      I was the same the first two times I tried to use rust (earnestly). However, one day it just "clicked" and my productivity exceeds that of almost anything else, for the specific type of work I'm doing (scientific computation)

      1 reply →

  • zozbot234  9 months ago

    Yes, the Google folks are also funding efforts to improve Rust/C++ interop, per https://security.googleblog.com/2024/02/improving-interopera...

    • Sn0wCoder  9 months ago

      Thanks for the link. This one was also posted awhile back in a rust comment and when I first read it, I thought Google had used Rust in the V8 sandbox, but re-reading it seems that the article uses Rust as an ‘example’ of a memory safe language but does not explicitly say that it uses Rust. Maybe someone with more knowledge can confirm that Rust was (or was not) used in the V8 Google Chrome sandbox example….

      https://v8.dev/blog/sandbox

      1 reply →

SunlitCat  9 months ago

Theoretically accessible describes the experience of trying to use D3D from C very well!

Was trying to use it with some kind of gcc for windows. The C++ part was still lacking some required features, so it was advised to use D3D from C instead C++. There were some helper macros, but overall I was glad when Microsoft started to release their Express (and later Community) Editions of Visual Studio.

  • flohofwoe  9 months ago

    I access D3D(11) from C in my libraries and tbh it's not any different from C++ in terms of usability (only difference is that the "this" argument and vtable indirection is implicit in C++, but that's just syntax sugar that can be wrapped in a macro in C).