Evaluating Rust for game development
Evaluating Rust for game development
There is no doubt that Rust is gaining popularity as a system development language and most of the time games and game engines are built using languages such as c or c++ which were born with the same target in mind, being able to access all the capabilities that a machine has to offer with the minimum runtime overhead.
In the last years, powerful engines and tools have offered a pletora of bindings for different languages like C#, Lua, Python, Javascript and so on with great results; for example Unity have had and continue to have a great success providing a powerful platform to build game on so why taking the risk and effort to use such a low level language to build a game?
As an "old school" developer I prefer to be in control of my software development stack and often, instead of creating the game that I have in mind, I start creating an engine to build my game on...but why? That's because it is fun! Or because for some simple game it seems to be easier to create a small library (or extend some old code) instead of using a powerfull solution like Unreal Engine, or and or and or...
I have started creating games again and again using high level languages like Python, Javascript, Lua and even the good old c++; in general I really like to create prototypes with python but it is not easy to distribute your games and almost impossible (or reaay hard) to target mobile platforms. Another option is to target the browser with the growing set of available engines but again, targeting mobile platforms can be a problem and targeting consoles is almost impossible.
Rust on the other end is a very young player in the field but with its ability to target many architectures I think that starting to think about using it can be a safe bet; there is at least one success story for using rust for game development and the final result is encouraging<https://www.rust-lang.org/pdfs/Rust-Chucklefish-Whitepaper.pdf>.
List of available resources
Right now the best collection of rust game development related project can be found in the "Are we game yet" page<http://arewegameyet.com/>. this web site maintain a list of frameworks and engines fro the lowest level flavour to the most complete game engine.
Of all the available solutions ggez<https://github.com/ggez/ggez/> (Good Game Easy) is the one which attracts me the most because I like to create small prototypes and not having the knowledge overhead required by other full featured engines or frameworks like piston<https://github.com/PistonDevelopers/piston> or amethyst<https://github.com/amethyst/amethyst> it is helpful when experimenting; it also feels like a microframework to which you can add the components you need without having to comply with other people choices and taste.