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>* Games can't get by with just malloc-style memory management- and while it's easy to mess up, C and C++ handle arenas/pools/etc with far less friction than Ru

by scythe 10y ago

>* Games can't get by with just malloc-style memory management- and while it's easy to mess up, C and C++ handle arenas/pools/etc with far less friction than Rust, where you'd want to package up every little pointer thing behind a safe API. That's a good tradeoff here because the bugs are mostly harmless and easy to track given the constrained environment. I don't see why this isn't fixable? It's just a lack of library support AFAICT. >* Maybe error handling? (Mostly devil's advocate at this point.) The games I've worked on tend to just assert in debug mode and ignore errors in production. Carefully handling every case could legitimately be a needless time sink for some situations. On the other hand stuff like `unwrap_or` could make that much clearer without slowing anyone down. I don't know much about this in C++ but I know that error handling in Go is at least as bad. Rust's fancy type system should in theory make error handling easier if you use it correctly (that's supposed to be an advantage of type systems after all) but it requires not just understanding how the type system can be used for error correction but a way of integrating that knowledge into development methodologies. This has to be developed by the teams themselves although it also forms a part of the collective knowledge base of the programming community (most of us are familiar with unit tests in imperative languages at this point). >* I don't agree with all of tomaka's points (e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/616rc8/rcpp_discusses... https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/616rc8/rcpp_discusses...) but they would certainly be an issue for many game developers. Just guessing: >The biggest is probably the fact that it's impossible to safely put a borrowee and a borrower in the same struct. This has very deep consequences on API design. You should probably use `unsafe` for this. As noted, you're flying blind if you do this in C++ as well. It's possible that some partial solutions will be implemented but I doubt that the project will cover every possible use case. The reason that this isn't in safe Rust is that it's very hard to reason about when this is and isn't safe. An issue is that people have difficulty reasoning about the behavior of unsafe Rust because of its unfamiliar semantics. >No decltype is really a deal breaker as well. The core team has recently added the -> impl Trait syntax because iterators and futures were too annoying to deal with. I'm manipulating types that are ten times worse than iterators, and I have to put them in my structs. Holy pretty printer Batman! Let me see: >When you write struct Foo<T: Trait> it's the user of the struct that choose what T is. In my code I have a very precise type that I want to put in the struct, I just can't express it in the source code because it's too long. I don't want the user to choose this type for me, this is totally difference. I think this could be fixed in exactly the way that tomaka wants it to be fixed, by allowing type aliasing which is limited to a particular lexical scope. Since this is basically equivalent to creating a trait which is only implemented by a single type (which he could in theory do but it's very awkward) it shouldn't introduce any new complexity to the type system. Tomaka's other points are being fixed. Rust is a very large undertaking...

Rusky 10y ago
> memory management > It's just a lack of library support AFAICT. Libraries could help, but game often have a lot of one-off memory stuff too that you can't put in a library and you can't do in safe Rust. Maybe there are some more creative solutions that nobody's had to come up with yet because C makes it so frictionless. > error handling in Go is at least as bad The thing is that style lets you ignore errors in cases where the error isn't gonna happen. That's usually bad, but in games it's often fine because you control everything. The equivalent in Rust requires an `unwrap` of some kind which introduces performance and syntactic overhead. I guess all I'm getting at is that beyond the implementation, there is still design work to be done if we want Rust to work well for games.
- mmstick 10y ago
  > The thing is that style lets you ignore errors in cases where the error isn't gonna happen. That's usually bad, but in games it's often fine because you control everything. The equivalent in Rust requires an `unwrap` of some kind which introduces performance and syntactic overhead. The contradiction in your logic here is that if you don't want to handle errors, then don't design your functions to return errors. In addition, many of the larger time game studios write and use their own standard library, so they could devise an efficient 'game stdlib' where they don't have to pay such costs.

by scythe 10y ago

Rusky 10y ago

> memory management > It's just a lack of library support AFAICT. Libraries could help, but game often have a lot of one-off memory stuff too that you can't put in a library and you can't do in safe Rust. Maybe there are some more creative solutions that nobody's had to come up with yet because C makes it so frictionless. > error handling in Go is at least as bad The thing is that style lets you ignore errors in cases where the error isn't gonna happen. That's usually bad, but in games it's often fine because you control everything. The equivalent in Rust requires an `unwrap` of some kind which introduces performance and syntactic overhead. I guess all I'm getting at is that beyond the implementation, there is still design work to be done if we want Rust to work well for games.

mmstick 10y ago
> The thing is that style lets you ignore errors in cases where the error isn't gonna happen. That's usually bad, but in games it's often fine because you control everything. The equivalent in Rust requires an `unwrap` of some kind which introduces performance and syntactic overhead. The contradiction in your logic here is that if you don't want to handle errors, then don't design your functions to return errors. In addition, many of the larger time game studios write and use their own standard library, so they could devise an efficient 'game stdlib' where they don't have to pay such costs.