Comment by mikepurvis
4 months ago
The advantages of correctness, memory safety, and a rich type system are worth something, but I expect it's a lot less when you're up against the value of a whole game design ecosystem with tools, assets, modules, examples, documentation, and ChatGPT right there to tell you how it all fits together.
Perhaps someday there will be a comparable game engine written in Rust, but it would probably take a major commercial sponsor to make it happen.
One of the challenges I never quite got over completely, was that I was always fighting rust fundamentals, which tells me I never fully assimilated into thinking like a rustacean.
This was more of a me-problem, but I was constantly having to change my strategy to avoid fighting the borrow-checker, manage references, etc. In any case, it was a productivity sink.
I bet, and that's particularly difficult when so much of modern game dev is just repeating extremely well-worn patterns— moving entities around and providing for scripted and emergent interactions between those entities and the player(s).
That's not to say that games aren't a very cool space to be in, but the challenges have moved beyond the code. Particularly in the indie space, for 10+ years it's been all about story, characters, writing, artwork, visual identity, sound and music design, pacing, unique gameplay mechanics, etc. If you're making a game in 2025 and the hard part is the code, then you're almost certainly doing it wrong.
[dead]
This was my experience with Rust. I've bounced off it a few times and I think I've decided its just not for me.
Personally, I don’t think of it as fighting, more like “compiler assistance” —
you want to make some change, so you adjust a struct or a function signature, and then your IDE highlights all the places where changes are necessary with red squigglies.
Once you’re done playing whack-a-mole with the red squigglies, and tests pass, you know there’s no weird random crash hiding somewhere