Comment by pizza234
7 hours ago
Yes, based on a few attempts chronicled in articles from different sources, Rust is a weak choice for game development, because it's too time-consuming to refactor.
7 hours ago
Yes, based on a few attempts chronicled in articles from different sources, Rust is a weak choice for game development, because it's too time-consuming to refactor.
Yup, this one (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43824640) comes to mind. The first comment says "Another failed game project in Rust", hinting that this is very common.
There's also the fact that a lot of patterns that are commonly used in game development are fundamentally at odds with the borrow checker.
Relevant: https://youtu.be/4t1K66dMhWk?si=dZL2DoVD94WMl4fI
Basically all of those problems originate with the tradition of conflating pointers and object identity, which is a problem in Rust as soon as you have ambiguous ownership or incongruent access patterns.
It's also very often not the best way to identify objects, for many reasons, including performance (spatial locality is a big deal).
These problems go away almost completely by simply using `EntityID` and going through `&mut World` for modifications, rather than passing around `EntityPtr`. This pattern gives you a lot of interesting things for free.
The video I linked to is long but goes through all of this.
Pretty much nobody writing games in C++ uses raw pointers in entities to hold references to other related entities, because entities can be destroyed at any time and there's no simple way for a referring entity to know when a referenced entity is destroyed.
Using some sort of entity ID or entity handle is very common in C++, the problem is that when implementing this sort of system in Rust, developers often end up having to effectively "work around" the borrow checker, and they end up not really gaining anything in terms of correctness over C++, ultimately defeating the purpose of using Rust in the first place, at least for that particular system.
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We've only had 6-7 years of hame dev in rust. Bevy is coming along nicely and will hopefully remove these pain points
"Mit dem Angriff Steiner's wird das alles in Ordnung kommen" ;)
As shitty as C++ is from today's PoV, the entire gaming industry switched over within around 3 years towards the end of the 90s. 6..7 years is a long time, and a single engine (especially when it's more or less just a runtime without editor and robust asset pipeline) won't change the bigger picture that Rust is a pretty poor choice for gamedev.
> As shitty as C++ is from today's PoV, the entire gaming industry switched over within around 3 years towards the end of the 90s.
Did they? What's your evidence? Are you including consoles?
Btw, the alternatives in the 1990s were worse than they are now, so the bar to clear for eg C or C++ were lower.
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And there are millions of game engines written in C++. Many of them have also been coming along nicely for years.
Making a nontrivial game with them is a wholly different story.