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"Safety-enforcing languages like Rust are going somewhat off already by definition, as they're focusing primarily on safety, which is not the focus for most gam
by dikaiosune 11y ago
"Safety-enforcing languages like Rust are going somewhat off already by definition, as they're focusing primarily on safety, which is not the focus for most game code."
I don't really agree with this assessment (I think rust's "safety guarantees" really amount to amazing compile time programmer assistance), but that's their stated reason.
- pjmlp 11y agoWhat many that issue that kind of statements forget, is that safety is also a means to keep the game experience clean. Exploiting buffer overflows, stack corruptions and friends is how we get to earn extra lifes, bypass hard levels, get extra ammunition and so on.
- dikaiosune 11y agoAre you saying those are good things or bad things in the context of games? As I commented elsewhere, it's not that I don't think that Rust's safety isn't important, but it's not the only worthwhile element of the language and I think it's good to recognize that its safety guarantees can eliminate many "non-safety" bugs in many programs.
- pjmlp 11y agoI am saying they are bad things, then again game developers aren't known for worrying 1s about safety anyway, specially if that implies 1ms less, even if that isn't an issue for the game being developed.
- shmerl 11y agoThe major benefit is simply avoiding all kind of crashes which plague many games.
- pjmlp 11y agoThat is another thing that sadly many game developers usually don't care that much, given time to market.
- shmerl 11y agoWhich is surprising, since games are very much human faced, and those crashes is what's considered reducing the value quite a bit. So using something like Rust should be a big boon for game developers. The only issue is that some things will still remain in the unsafe area (i.e. interfacing with graphics backend and such), but at least the code that developers control can be safer.