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Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years
(loglog.games)
Welcome to the Rust community! This is a place to discuss about the Rust programming language.
Credits
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.
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.
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.