Comment by troad
23 days ago
Rust has really struggled to break through in gamedev. Rust's core premise is trading off dev speed and flexibility for memory safety, but it turns out that dev speed and flexibility is far more important in gamedev than memory safety.
If you have a formally specified microkernel that's already blueprinted to within an inch of its life, Rust is probably a great choice for you. If, on the other hand, you need to rapidly throw slime at a wall to see what sticks and makes for fun gameplay, Rust is going to make that much more challenging than virtually any other language, and the benefits are far from obvious (your quick and dirty gameplay slice that took much longer to make is slightly more memory safe?).
I'm not the only person who's done gamedev in Rust and has since definitely turned away from the language for that use case, see e.g. "Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years" [0], which remains one of the most widely discussed and liked Hacker News posts about Rust to date.
More broadly, it's obvious that Rust is far more hyped than Cobol is. That means there are many examples of valiant attempts at OSS or hobby projects in Rust by the devs most susceptible to hype (generally enthusiastic beginners). Conversely, writing a Minecraft server in Cobol requires slightly more whimsy and derring-do, which tends to correlate with greater experience.
> Rust's core premise is trading off dev speed and flexibility for memory safety
Rust's main competitor in gamedev is C++, which is not especially known for its "dev speed and flexibility". There are ways to do fast, iterative development in Rust, they just involve quite a bit of boilerplate (to mark all the places where you're giving up some amount of low-level performance in the name of flexibility). If anything, the main disadvantage of Rust is simply that its community, while highly committed to technical excellency, is nonetheless orders of magnitude smaller than the huge amount of C++ developers.
I respectfully disagree, emphasis on respectfully. C++ absolutely does have Rust beat on dev speed on flexibility. I would much rather prototype a quick and dirty gameplay slice in C++ over Rust, and I think so would most people. That flexibility comes at a cost, of course. C++ is three languages in a trenchcoat, waiting for you to turn away so it can bash you over the head and mug you.
There are ways to do anything in Rust, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a language less suited for fast iteration than many others. It's a good tool, just not the best tool for this particular job, and there's no obvious reason to use it over those tools that are a better fit. For the vast majority of games, something like C# is going to make rapid prototyping far easier than either Rust or C++, with far less overhead (overhead = time = money, and gamedev is a pretty cutthroat business).
Rust's community is not particularly small, all things considered, and even adjusting for size, Rust really does under-perform in gamedev. Rust's definition of 'technical excellence' often revolves largely around memory safety, which is something I definitely want from my air traffic control systems, but which barely matters in gamedev at all. There are other things that constitute technical excellence in gamedev, and these tend to be difficult or undesirable in idiomatic Rust (often precisely because they prioritise other goals over memory safety). Rust is a fine language, I'm fairly fond of it, but it's just not a good fit for this use case. And indeed, we see the consequences of that bear out in practice.
(I'd also encourage you to read the comment thread I link above - lots of experienced people agree on this one.)
Being productive with C++ tools and dependencies has much steeper learning curve than Rust as a language, and has you spend way more effort on a constant basis.
I can be productive in C#/F#, Rust, Go or TypeScript in a fraction of time it takes to accomplish so in C++ the moment you go beyond something trivial. It’s not the fault of the language per se but of everything around it.
It’s one of the reasons some people are so upset about C++ and Rust, in my opinion. Working with C and C++ involves huge amount of pain and hassle that is absolutely not required to accomplish whatever task you are dealing with.
> Rust's community is not particularly small, all things considered
It absolutely is. Your linked thread has people describing the 3D- or 2D-rendering stacks available in Rust as half-baked in some way or other, with other folks saying that it's hard or infeasible to get Rust code on consoles where the manufacturer forces you to use their dev SDK. This is what a smaller community looks like in practical terms.