I used to agree with this re. games, but I realized over the past couple of years that the ubiquity of multicore complicates this a lot. I don't see a way to multithread game logic in a scalable way without aliasable-xor-mutable, and Rust is kind of the only game in town for that right now. - ThreadSky

pcwalton.bsky.social • 27 days ago

I used to agree with this re. games, but I realized over the past couple of years that the ubiquity of multicore complicates this a lot. I don't see a way to multithread game logic in a scalable way without aliasable-xor-mutable, and Rust is kind of the only game in town for that right now.

Comments

without.boats•27 days ago

I agree with you re games! I think there are many applications where the performance difference doesn’t justify the additional thought about data structuring that Rust requires because it gives users so much control

there.is.no.aarch64.mov•27 days ago

for the most part many things i use rust for are simply because getting a native binary out is the least annoying distribution mechanism for me. and the tooling is good! this is very funny to me though, since i also use rust (and learned it!) for more typical "need to care" reasons

sunshowers.io•27 days ago

Yeah I mean I use it for things that can't be done in other environments, so it makes sense to carry over my expertise to solve problems that can be done in other environments

sunshowers.io•27 days ago

I've lived the polyglot life, I enjoy going deeper into one language a bit more personally

sgrif.bsky.social•27 days ago

And that language is JavaScript

there.is.no.aarch64.mov•27 days ago

no joke getting nodejs to dump assembly at me however many years ago was a pretty huge moment in realizing computer programs are, basically, knowable

mgattozzi.dev•27 days ago

Personally I would just flip the switches to my hand crafted CPU.

pcwalton.bsky.social•27 days ago

I mean, I've tried to come up with potential solutions, and I really can't, other than "test orderings and fix races manually" (what you do in Unity DOTS), which isn't a very attractive option when there's an alternative that lets you just not have to worry about it.

pcwalton.bsky.social•27 days ago

I wouldn't be surprised if there's some hypothetical language that's better at solving the problems of scalable multithreaded game dev than Rust, because as you correctly point out manual memory management is a burden, but sadly there doesn't seem to be any work in this area. Zig and Jai aren't it.

mrechsteiner.bsky.social•27 days ago

How do you feel about Swift for game development? With the new data-race safety guarantees, combined with automatic reference counting, it sounds like it could be a good match

pcwalton.bsky.social•27 days ago

I'm not super familiar with it, honestly. I would note that Bevy has a huge head start at this point, though.

piss.beauty•27 days ago

I think the combo of a custom job scheduler with safety checks & "high performance c#" compiler that we pursued independent of DOTS is still a great programming model for games. I still think this even having left Unity & doing rust for a while now

Comments

Posting Rules

Reply