Comment by pcwalton
9 months ago
> That said as a few other people pointed out, the key is iteration, hot-reload and other things. Given the choice I'd probably do(and have done) a Rust based engine core where you need performance/stability and some dynamic language on top(Lua, quickjs, etc) for actual game content.
I fully agree that this will likely be the solution a lot of people want to go with in Bevy: scripting for quick iteration, Rust for the stuff that has to be fast. (Also thank you for the kind words!)
Yeah, it's a fairly clean and natural divide. You see it in most of the major engines and it was present in all the proprietary engines I worked on(we mostly used Lua/LuaJIT since this predated some great recent options like quickjs).
We even had things like designers writing scripts for AI in literate programming with Lua using coroutines. We fit in 400kb of space for code + runtime using Lua on the PSP(man that platform was a nightmare but the scripting worked out really well).
Rust excels when you know what you want to build, and core engine tech fits that category pretty cleanly. Once you get up in game logic/behavior that iteration loop is so dynamic that you are prototyping more than developing.