Lessons learned after 3 years of fulltime Rust game development, and why we're leaving Rust behind

• Once you get good at Rust all of these problems will go away
• Rust being great at big refactorings solves a largely self-inflicted issues with the borrow checker
• Indirection only solves some problems, and always at the cost of dev ergonomics
• ECS solves the wrong kind problem
• Generalized systems don’t lead to fun gameplay
• Making a fun & interesting games is about rapid prototyping and iteration, Rust’s values are everything but that
• Procedural macros are not even “we have reflection at home”
• Hot reloading is more important for iteration speed than people give it credit for
• Abstraction isn’t a choice
• GUI situation in Rust is terrible
• Reactive UI is not the answer to making highly visual, unique and interactive game UI
• Orphan rule should be optional
• Compile times have improved, but not with proc macros
• Rust gamedev ecosystem lives on hype
• Global state is annoying/inconvenient for the wrong reasons, games are single threaded.
• Dynamic borrow checking causes unexpected crashes after refactorings
• Context objects aren’t flexible enough
• Positives of Rust
• Closing thoughts

Disclaimer: This post is a very long collection of thoughts and problems I’ve had over the years, and also addresses some of the arguments I’ve been repeatedly told. This post expresses my opinion the has been formed over using Rust for gamedev for many thousands of hours over many years, and multiple finished games. This isn’t meant to brag or indicate success, but rather just show there has been more than enough effort put into Rust, to dispel the the commonly said “once you gain enough experience it’ll all make sense” argument.

Read in full here:

https://loglog.games/blog/leaving-rust-gamedev/

This thread was posted by one of our members via one of our news source trackers.