Comment by logicprog

I only skimmed this article, but, despite it being very negative about Rust, I almost 100% agree with it: Rust is a HORRIBLE choice for game dev. I might quibble with how they outline the costs and benefits of some of the design patterns that rust forces you into, for instance I think command lists are actually incredibly useful and perfectly fine as a game development thing and not the huge problem they consider them to be, and generational arenas basically solve any pointer ownership problems in game development in my opinion, but they are right in the main.

I know, because I've tried it. Once. I would #never* recommend Rust to game developers, especially not indie ones. In fact I'd recommend against it strenuously!

And this is precisely because Rust is explicitly and knowingly focused on correctness, safety, perfectly clean code, etc at the cost of iteration speed and flexibility and dynamicism, and that's bad for designing game mechanics and even just getting a game done — games have an inherently short life span and development cycle, so safety and correctness and code quality don't matter a whole lot. It's okay if they crash, etc, as long as they work enough to play. It's okay if the code is ugly, you probably won't be working on it for very long. This is even moreso the case, as the author says, because in writing a game you really want to be able to iterate quickly and just. Do shit as an experiment, even if it's temporary, to see how it feels.

On the other hand, who I would recommend Rust to is the people writing game engines, where you really will probably be working on that code for years to come, where stability and correctness is pretty important, and so where Rust's strengths will really shine — but crucially, even then, I'd tell them to make it a real engine, not a game framework like Bevy, by adding a highly flexible, dynamic scripting language like Lua or even C#, and a data format for specifying scenes and entities, and an editor. That way you don't write your game in Rust at all!