Comment by 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.
But then the question becomes - why Rust, if you deliberately work around its single most prominent distinguishing feature?
The main feature of rust isn't borrow checking, the feature is safe low level programming. Borrow checking is Rust's default way of doing this, but it's not the only one (the standard library has Reference Counting primitives built in).
Borrow checking is a way to make manual memory management safe, ECS works around manual memory management entirely, so it doesn't need borrow checking to be safe (which is also why it's popular in C++, which doesn't have a borrow checker) but because it's Rust, you have strong guarantees about the safety of it, while in C++ you can still shoot yourself in the foot if you don't use ECS the right way.
Also Rust is more than safety: https://steveklabnik.com/writing/rust-is-more-than-safety
I would argue that borrow checking is the only feature that is actually unique (more or less) to Rust. If you don't need it, you can get the rest from elsewhere, often with better ergonomics.
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