Comment by codethief

9 months ago

To be fair, many (non-game dev) Rust projects I have seen/used do provide great user experience precisely because they are laser-focused on performance and have blown existing alternatives out of the water. (Think ripgrep, fzf, etc.)

Prototyping is certainly necessary but it shouldn't be at the cost of runtime performance – at least not too much –, because it will typically be very difficult to improve performance after the fact, which web development frameworks, and in particular shitty "web" applications like MS Teams are a testament to.

As always, it's about balance.

> ripgrep, fzf

I think these are great examples of where prototyping and rapid iteration are really not needed at all, and hence Rust shines here.

Writing a game is completely different.

  • The initial version of ripgrep was absolutely a rapid prototype.

    I do rapid prototyping all the time.

    I'm not saying Rust is good for game dev, but the idea that Rust cannot be used for rapid prototyping in any context is a myth.

    • Indeed, I personally find Rust to be very nice for rapid prototyping, incremental recompilation is usually a second or two even in my giant projects (mold helps on the linking step but that's less of a rust thing anyway), and I'm very curious how cranelift will change things in the future, it would be nice to hot swap function implementations on the fly at least.