- cross-posted to:
- gamedev@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- gamedev@programming.dev
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:
As a software engineer who has worked in games, I disagree with you. Using a systems programming language like C, C++,Java or C# would all be much better for writing games from scratch than Rust. Rust really does have some unique issues. It’s still a great language, just bad for quick iteration
I’ll grant C# is easier to iterate with. But C/C++, i don’t think so. You still have to carefully consider ownership with those, just like Rust, and refactoring can be laborious. Except with Rust once it compiles your code is probably correct, ownership-wise, which iterates considerably faster than running C++ code and getting segfaults (or data races)…
I helped ship multiple games. All of them used scripting languages, like Lua or in-house, for gameplay code. It makes sense for iteration.
Oh and C# and Java come at a cost, of course. It’s easy to write them, I’m a big fan of C#’s design, but its overuse is also how we ended up with so many relatively simple indie games which consume gigabytes of memory and constantly drop frames stalling for GC. Nothing is without tradeoffs.
I agree with you about the tradeoffs that C# and Java make to gain ease of use at the cost of memory use. In a lot of cases that’s a fine tradeoff. It doesn’t matter much too me whether an indy game needs a little more memory. I’ll also agree that C is going to be less safe than Rust (and Java, C#). But I still think it’s an easy language to iterate in. It’s a very simple language.