Comment by lelanthran

9 months ago

> As the article pointed out, game developers are less productive in Rust. This is a huge problem.

I don't think it's limited to just game developers though. Unless you are writing something in which any GC time other than 0ns is a dealbreaker, and any bug is also a dealbreaker, you're going to be less productive in Rust than almost any other language.

Oh, come on, we're yet again extrapolating from "Rust is bad at rapid iteration on an indie game" to "Rust is bad at everything". If Rust were really that astoundingly unproductive of a language, then so many developers at organizations big and small wouldn't be using it. Our industry may be irrational at times, but it's not that irrational.

  • > Oh, come on, we're yet again extrapolating from "Rust is bad at rapid iteration on an indie game" to "Rust is bad at everything".

    I am saying that Rust development has a lower velocity than mainstream GC'ed languages (Java, C#, Go, whatever).

    I didn't think that you are disputing this claim; if you are disputing this, I'd like to know why you think otherwise.

    • > I am saying that Rust development has a lower velocity than mainstream GC'ed languages (Java, C#, Go, whatever).

      It depends what you measure

      For software that must get it right Rust can be more productive. The early cycles of development are slow, especially for people who have not surrendered to the borrow checker, yet. But the lack of simple mistakes, or more accurately the compiler's early detection of simple mistakes dramatically speeds up development

      But in a lot of software those mistakes, whilst important, will not "crash the aeroplane ", so it is not worth that extra cost in the early cycles

      I am not a game developer, or player, but games are in that category I think

    • > I am saying that Rust development has a lower velocity than mainstream GC'ed languages (Java, C#, Go, whatever).

      That's not what you said: you said you're going to be less productive in Rust than nearly any other language, not "mainstream GC'd languages".

      > I didn't think that you are disputing this claim; if you are disputing this, I'd like to know why you think otherwise.

      Depending on the domain, I am disputing that, because of things like the Cargo ecosystem, easy parallelism, ease of interop with native code, etc. There is no equivalent to wgpu in other languages, for example.

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