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Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years (loglog.games)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by 1984@lemmy.today to c/rust@programming.dev

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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

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[-] farcaster@lemmy.world 34 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

TLDR: "I picked a systems programming language to write and iterate on a bunch of gameplay scripting. Why does Rust not meet the needs of a gameplay scripting language like <every link in the article which either refers to dedicated game-programming scripting languages, or Unity which is whole goddamn commercial game engine>. Hmm yes, the problem must lie with Rust, not with the choices I made in my project."

Just try to write a complete game with nothing but open source libraries in C++, or C#, or Java. Good luck with that. The author is switching to Unity for a very good reason. It turns out a commercial product made by 6000 people delivers value...

You use a systems programming language to write your engine. And then a scripting language to write your game. Everybody in gamedev knows this, I thought.

[-] Phoenix3875@lemmy.world 31 points 3 months ago

It's not that the author picked Rust for scripting. All Rust game engines (e.g. Bevy) use Rust as the scripting language.

Compare this with Godot, which is implemented in C++, but supports GDScript and many other languages for scripting.

Also, only supporting Rust is not considered a limitation, but a feature here. Bevy's ECS is tied up with Rust's trait system, therefore it's impossible to use a different language.

So if Rust as a system programming language should not be used for game scripting, then projects like Bevy are fundamentally flawed. The author is willing to go there, but I don't know if many people would go that far.

There could be a Godot-like engine written in Rust that supports easier scripting languages, but I think that space is not explored due to the fact that Godot already exists.

[-] Octorine@midwest.social 15 points 3 months ago

It's also worth noting that before bevy, there was a rust game engine called Amethyst, which was planning on using a scripting language for gameplay code. Not having to use a scripting language, but getting to use rust instead, was one of the big selling points of Bevy overr Amethyst.

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this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2024

106 points (96.5% liked)