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this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2024
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What sucks is I've been working on this hobby project for nearly 4 years now. It started in C#, moved to C, now C++. It's at the stage where a lot of basic functionality has been implemented, with the largest component, the Vulkan based renderer being maybe 1/4 implemented. The core game stuff is ECS based and flecs has a rust binding so migrating that will be easy. Renderer will just become even further from completion. I'm worried that there will be new problems that are maybe more inhibiting, but this is meant to be a fun project and build systems aren't fun. It's a difficult balance and I'm not the only person involved, the other person isn't as convinced by cargo as they haven't spent days working on the build system
I'm a gameplay programmer who have worked with Unity and Unreal and I've experiment with Rust for gamedev(though only for hobby projects) and for regular code. My conclusions so far is that Rust sucks for gameplay code, for most other things it's kinda nice.
The biggest reason is that it's much harder to write prototype code to test out an idea to see if it's feasible and feels/looks good enough. I don't want to be forced to fully plan out my code and deal with borrowing issues before I even have an idea of if this is a good path or not.
I would say though that because you are using ECS stuff it is at least plausible to do in Rust but at least for my coding/development style it still isn't a good fit.
There are options for this with Rust. If you wanted to use pure Rust you could always use unsafe to do prototyping and then come back and refactor if you like it. Alternatively you could write bindings for C/C++ and do prototyping that way.
Though, I will say that this process gets easier as you gain more experience with Rust memory management.
Unsafe doesn't let you just ignore the borrow checker, which is what generally tripped me up when learning to write rust.
That’s fair, I honestly haven’t used it in a while and forgot the real usage of unsafe code. As I said to another comment, it is a really rough language for game dev as it necessitates very different patterns from other languages. Definitely better to learn game dev itself pretty well first in something like C++, then to learn Rust separately before trying game dev in Rust.