Oh no don’t get me wrong, a year back I upgraded to an I5-7500 prebuilt, and it’s a beast for all my tasks. (maybe compiling is quick because I split modules a little too much?)

Your advice is good for not knowing what I’m making. If I was making something multi threaded with much state I would fear UB more.

may be much rarer in Debug because of speed difference

Thanks, then I will remember to recreate bugs with opt-level = 3.

Wait no, this doesn’t make sense if I don’t have access to the user’s machine, maybe I should send him a log-heavy version of some sort? How should I even what I am supposed to log? I should think about this some more before release.

Do you have any sources about this “unfitness” of Rust for gamedev? From my experience many people have problems with the borrow checker due to habits they obtained coding in other languages.

I can’t say anything for sure, but I read this article, in conjunction with this article, before I made this post, so you might consider looking at it, and how it influenced me.

Edit: wait, I’ll extend this reply even more.

Edit 2: Done:

So I’d be interested what special behavior occurs in gamedev that makes coding in Rust more difficult than for other software.

Maybe it’s because the gaming industry is historically among the slowest industries, they stuck with DOS until there was literally no drivers on it for the latest GPUs, only then did they upgrade. There’s a video explaining how a recent AAA game could run on the steam deck, but not on Linux, it turns out the game was using a Windows XP library that’s too old for wine to support, so how did it work on the deck? they effectively added this to their code:

if platform_name == "steamdeck" { use_modern_library() }

, which explains why it only ran on the deck, but notice how they still stuck to the ~2003 library as the default even though the modern one works, that’s how much they hate change.

Considering the above, suggesting they change the particular way of their forefathers wouldn’t be fruitful, unless extremely obvious B I G gains are to be found. Notice how Jonathan Blow’s game development language is literally ‘C++ but better’, and how it mimics C++ in everything but the universally hated parts, and adds none but the universally wanted features. (as universal as an industry can agree on anything, that is)

That may be because games are a dangerous business, you pool all your resources in one project, and you get basically no income for up to four years, then you release and possibly succeed.

I also speculate that games aren’t really maintained, most of the best games I know only received 3 patches at most (version 1.3). I think the priority isn’t: “How am I gonna remember how this works in 3 months from now and deal with technical dept”, it’s more like: “How can I implement this in a way that the only thing faster than the implementation time is the feature itself?”, so there is no fear of possibly breaking something that the checker can save you from down the road.

The last sentence kinda doesn’t make sense since the first 3 years are more that enough technical dept for Rust to start doing its thing, but IDK how they think.

Bonus: look for Jonathan Blow’s opinions on Rust on Youtube, he is an example of a studio owner fearing the risk of the possible “friction” that the Borrow checker could possibly cause.

Hello Pers,

I made a mistake when writing the post, it reads like I am against the borrow checker, which I am not, I love the checker, and didn’t encounter any - major - problems with it.

I meant that even if we used unsafe everywhere it would still be a good language, which is an attempt at arguing with those saying that Rust isn’t fit for gamedev because the of the checker. Which I failed at due to lack of experience, as this is my first time making a game, and Rust is my first language*.

Regarding: “If it doesn’t panic in Debug, it won’t act weird on Release”, even if I got reported a really weird bug related to UB, I should (I am not experienced enough to make a claim) be able to know it’s UB since the game’s gonna crash when I try to recreate the bug in Debug.

Some would say that shipping the game with runtime checks won’t have an effect on performance, which is probably true, since it’s so simple the list of entities is an array (not a vector), and the game state is - effectively - global (everything is impl CombatContext { fn x(&mut self) {} })**, and some (most? too early in development to tell) of the game is locked at 5fps (maybe I’ll bump it up a bit)***.

I am so concerned about performance because I had to daily drive a computer that most people on this website - and especially on Reddit - would consider garbage E-waste, for 4 years, and was trying hard to play games on it, which was further amplified by my GPU not supporting Vulkan (nor Dx9 for some time), which meant I couldn’t use Proton, which taught me some hacks that are… let’s not talk about them.

So I find huge pain in leaving any possible performance optimizations, especially that some people I know are stuck on - arguably - worse machines****; accessibility is a big priority.

It also makes me angry to see pixel games come with 70Mib binaries and require Vulkan because:

1 - internet costs money

2 - they claim in the system requirements that their game “Should run on anything”.

Memes like: “Oh my game could run on a potato” infuriate me (good thing I don’t use social media), NO, your game can’t run a potato, DooM can, it was actually optimized properly, your 2D pixels can’t even render on a machine a 100x more powerful, you should feel ashamed*(5).

*: I was messing around with C# + Godot not super long ago, nothing serious.

**: I have been refactoring my code lately to limit the scope of most functions, in a way inspired by ECSs, but significantly more primitive.

***: the game has both a 3D and a 2D part, the 2D part has locked FPS, the 3D part can run at any framerate.

****: Macroquad supporting OpenGL only down to 2.0ES would be a problem, if I wasn’t intending on forking it anyway to reduce the binary size (grim is an extremely bloated dependency, I managed to shove off 10 Mib in a few hours), and unless using 1.x is as hard people on the internet claim it is, which is probably false, as these people are mostly weak and say the same things about using a custom engine.

*(5): this might sound toxic, but that’s how people get better.