4 ms·

> Maybe you don’t need Rust and WASM to speed up your JS Perhaps, but you do need it in order to have an excuse to use Rust and WASM. True story, this is what

> Maybe you don’t need Rust and WASM to speed up your JS Perhaps, but you do need it in order to have an excuse to use Rust and WASM. True story, this is what I did last weekend.

Animats 5y ago
That's the problem. Unless you're doing something which does a very large amount of work on the client, you should not need WASM. Game engine, yes. Blog, no. Shopping cart, no. Scrollbar, no. Snooping on the user's mouse cursor, NO.
- catlifeonmars 5y ago
  Absolutely. Incidentally, I’m very new to game programming (and performance-critical code in general). Are there high-level GC’d languages which are well suited for (pick some flavor of) game programming? I always read about C++ or (increasingly) Rust when it comes to game programming. Even with all its modern features, Rust still errs on the zero cost abstraction side when it comes to abstracting away the underlying memory and execution model. In 2021, are compilers, JITs, and GC algorithms still worse than humans at optimizing performance critical code? I thought we’d have moved past that by now.
  - Animats 5y ago
    Unity is mostly programmed in C#. It's a good way to start developing games. Unreal Engine and C++ are used for many AAA titles, but it's a harder world than Unity. There are some game engines in Rust for simpler 3D games. I haven't tried them. 2D games seem to be well supported in Rust. I'm working in Rust, writing a client for a virtual world, and I have to say that the 3D graphics ecosystem for that kind of thing in Rust is not quite there yet. I'm using bleeding edge packages (Rend3->WGPU->Vulkan) where I'm in regular contact with the developers. I'm doing it this way mostly because I want to see if I can get better performance than the existing single-thread C++ client, which is compute-bound in the main thread.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    Depends on what game you are looking to develop. There will always be an area where only low-level code will do, but for a great chunk of games, a modern high level language will be more than adequate. While it is not used as often as it should in my opinion, Java also has LWJGL, and with the newish low-latency GC, there won’t be any GC freeze happening.

> Maybe you don’t need Rust and WASM to speed up your JS Perhaps, but you do need it in order to have an excuse to use Rust and WASM. True story, this is what I did last weekend.

Animats 5y ago

That's the problem. Unless you're doing something which does a very large amount of work on the client, you should not need WASM. Game engine, yes. Blog, no. Shopping cart, no. Scrollbar, no. Snooping on the user's mouse cursor, NO.

catlifeonmars 5y ago
Absolutely. Incidentally, I’m very new to game programming (and performance-critical code in general). Are there high-level GC’d languages which are well suited for (pick some flavor of) game programming? I always read about C++ or (increasingly) Rust when it comes to game programming. Even with all its modern features, Rust still errs on the zero cost abstraction side when it comes to abstracting away the underlying memory and execution model. In 2021, are compilers, JITs, and GC algorithms still worse than humans at optimizing performance critical code? I thought we’d have moved past that by now.
- Animats 5y ago
  Unity is mostly programmed in C#. It's a good way to start developing games. Unreal Engine and C++ are used for many AAA titles, but it's a harder world than Unity. There are some game engines in Rust for simpler 3D games. I haven't tried them. 2D games seem to be well supported in Rust. I'm working in Rust, writing a client for a virtual world, and I have to say that the 3D graphics ecosystem for that kind of thing in Rust is not quite there yet. I'm using bleeding edge packages (Rend3->WGPU->Vulkan) where I'm in regular contact with the developers. I'm doing it this way mostly because I want to see if I can get better performance than the existing single-thread C++ client, which is compute-bound in the main thread.
- kaba0 5y ago
  Depends on what game you are looking to develop. There will always be an area where only low-level code will do, but for a great chunk of games, a modern high level language will be more than adequate. While it is not used as often as it should in my opinion, Java also has LWJGL, and with the newish low-latency GC, there won’t be any GC freeze happening.