Comment by krapht
3 months ago
The article title is half-true. It wasn't so much they migrated away from Rust, but that they migrated away from Bevy, which is an alpha quality game engine.
I wouldn't have read the article if it'd been labeled that, so kudos to the blog writer, I guess.
What are some non-alpha quality Rust game engines? If the answer is "there are none", then I'd say the title is accurate.
The problem with Rust is that almost everything is still at an alpha stage. The vast majority of crates are at version 0.x and are eventually abandoned, replaced, or subject to constant breaking changes
While the language itself is great and stable, the ecosystem is not, and reverting to more conservative options is often the most reasonable choice, especially for long-term projects.
I really don’t think Rust is a good match for game dev. Both because of the borrow checker which requires a lot of handles instead of pointers and because compile times are just not great.
But outside of games the situation looks very different. “Almost everything” is just not at all accurate. There are tons of very stable and productive ecosystems in Rust.
> I really don’t think Rust is a good match for game dev. Both because of the borrow checker which requires a lot of handles instead of pointers and because compile times are just not great.
I completely disagree, having been doing game dev in Rust for well over a year at this point. I've been extremely productive in Bevy, because of the ECS. And Unity compile times are pretty much just as bad (it's true, if you actually measure how long that dreaded "Reloading Domain" screen takes).
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Borrow checker is mostly a strawman for this discussion, the post is about using Bevy as an engine and Bevy uses an ECS than manages the lifetime of objects for you automatically. You will never have an issue with the borrow checker when using Bevy, not even once.
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I wouldn't say 'almost everything', but there are some areas which require a huge amount of time and effort to build a mature solution for, UI and game engines being one, where there are still big gaps.
It's still true for game dev indeed, but for back-end or CLI tools it hasn't been true in like 7 years or so.
> The problem with Rust is that almost everything is still at an alpha stage.
Replace Rust with Bevy and language with framework, you might have a point. Bevy is still in alpha, it's lacking plenty of things, mainly UI and an easy way to have mods.
As for almost everything is at an alpha stage, yeah. Welcome to OSS + SemVer. Moving to 1.x makes a critical statement. It's ready for wider use, and now we take backwards compatibility seriously.
But hurray! Commercial interest won again, and now you have to change engines again, once the Unity Overlords decide to go full Shittification on your poorly paying ass.
Unfortunately, it is a failing of many projects in the Rust sphere that they spend quite a lot longer in 0.x than other projects. Rust language and library features themselves often spend years in nightly before making it to a release build.
You can also always go from 1.0 to 2.0 if you want to make breaking changes.
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I have totally disagree here.
I don't even look at crate versions but the stuff works, very well. The resulting code is stable, robust and the crates save an inordinate amount of development time. It's like lego for high end, high performance code.
With Rust and the crates you can build actual, useful stuff very quickly. Hit a bug in a crate or have missing functionality? contribute.
Software is something that is almost always a work in progress and almost never perfect, and done. It's something you live with. Try any of this in C or C++.
They might be unsafe, but there is enough tooling to pick from 60 and 50 years of industrial use, approximately.
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>”reverting to more conservative options”
From what I’ve heard about the Rust community, you may have made an unintentionally witty pun.
They mentioned ABI and the ability to create mods, which are Rust things.
Here's a thought experiment: Would Minecraft have been as popular if it had been written in Rust instead of Java?
I mean, we already have a sort-of answer, because the "Bedrock Edition" of Minecraft is written in C++, and it is indeed less popular on PC (on console, it's the only option, so _overall_ it might win out) and does lack any real modding scene
Indeed. Java is sufficiently dynamic/decompilable a game written in it can be heavily modded without adding specific support. C++ is much harder (depending on the game engine), though not impossible. If you do add modding support then everything is much better regardless of language, though (see Factorio, written in C++ and with a huge modding scene, because it was basically written with modding in mind. Lua is certainly helping with that, of course).
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More surprising part for me is not migrating from Rust/Bevy, but migrating _to_ C#/Unity.
Although points mentioned in the post are quite valid.
Where would you migrate to?
Not OP, but it seems that there is still a huge sentiment that Unity is not a "safe" platform to migrate to because of their relatively antagonistic approach to monetization guidelines compared to other open source game engines. I do think it makes sense to also consider Godot given his coworker is his brother who is stated to be new to game development, it has a scripting language even simpler than C#, more like python. Additionally, one might expect that someone more into Rust might prefer the C++ integration that Unreal offers. I think the timeline had an effect here too, as it's not been until recently that people have been taking Godot more seriously.
Personally, literally anything except Unity. The fact that they tried to retroactively change terms on developers means that it will be a long time before I feel comfortable trusting they won't try it again.
Maybe godot? The unity scandal recently is not great for developers.
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