This was a really good summary of what Rust feels like in my opinion. I’m still a beginner myself but I recognize what this article is saying very much.

The hacker news comments are as usual very good too:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40172033

  • laund
    1•7 months ago

    @kaffiene @asdfasdfasdf i think part of the issue is that one group of devs is saying “rust is great for gamedev” by which they mean its a great language to develop games which are closer to game engines themselves in, or even custom engines. Then another group says “no it sucks” but they are talking about the scripting approach, where you don’t care what happens under the hood

    Rust fits the first group well, and the second not at all, and the issue is that both dont see the difference between

    • laund
      2•7 months ago

      @kaffiene @asdfasdfasdf by which i mean:

      if you want to develop on the level of a engine, even if you’re not makign a entire engine, Rust is IMO the most productive language. But these things also take a lot of time, which is why you don’t see big games being finished. There are some like Tiny Glade where the devs built a entire custom renderer on the other hand.

    • @asdfasdfasdf
      1•7 months ago

      Yeah, at this point I’m talking about Rust’s fit as a general purpose language and being good at refactoring. I think Rust is great for both of those and that it isn’t very subjective.

      But regarding Rust for game dev, I have no idea. I have never done game dev, so it’s definitely possible it isn’t good for it for some reason.

      I’m also saying scripting languages will break very easily when you refactor things. I didn’t think that was that controversial…

      • laund
        1•7 months ago

        @asdfasdfasdf as for scripting: no, thats not conteoversial. but this is abour gamedevs where languages like C# are used a lot, which is definitely not a scripting language

      • laund
        1•7 months ago

        @asdfasdfasdf i’m talking about gamedev sepcifically. there just hasnt been enough time for there to be a Unreal, Unity or Godot built for Rust as the main language. i don’t think its clear beforehand that in that context it wont work, but you’d also have to solve the no stable ABI issue first.

        Game engines need many years of time to develop to a point of what gamedevs coming from one of the big ones will expect, and there just hasnt been enough time yet to put in that effort.