Comment by the_mitsuhiko

4 months ago

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.

10 comments

the_mitsuhiko

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pcwalton  4 months ago

> 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).

  • hollerith  3 months ago

    "ECS" == Entity-Component-System, "a software architectural pattern commonly used in game development and other simulations for organizing game objects and their data," according to Google Gemini.

littlestymaar  4 months ago

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.

  • pclmulqdq  4 months ago

    Everything in every ECS system is done with handles, but the parent comment is correct that many games use hairballs of pointers all over the place (and they are handles with ECS). There is never a borrow checker issue with handles since they divorce the concept of a pointer from the concept of ownership.