Comment by 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

24 comments

pcwalton

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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!

  • heavyset_go  9 months ago

    That's disappointing on Microsoft's part, because their docs make it seem like windows-rs is the way of the future.

    Thanks for your work, though!

    • pjmlp  9 months ago

      Don't be, they also killed C++/CX, even went to CppCon 2016 telling us how great future C++/WinRT would bring to us.

      Now almost a decade later, VS tooling is still not there, stuck in ATL/VC++ 6.0 like experience (they blame it on the VS team), C++/WinRT is in maintenance, only bug fixes, and all the fun is on Rust/WinRT.

      I would never trust this work for production development.

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.

    • meheleventyone  9 months ago

      There’s a pretty big difference between the Playdate and anything else in performance but also in requirements for assets. So much so I hope your idea is scoped accordingly. But yeah Love2d is great.

      1 reply →

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)

    • vacuity  9 months ago

      I think we shouldn't expect any language to lead different programmers to the same experiences. Rust has the inital steep learning curve, and after that it's a matter of taste whether one is willing to forge on and turn it into a honed tool. Also, I think it's clear that Rust excels in some fields far more naturally than in others. Making blanket statements about how Rust, or any language, is (un)productive is a disservice to everyone.

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