bevy_mod_scripting VS mlua

As someone who's become a core contributor to Bevy lately, while also doing contract work in Unity on the side, I obviously disagree with the idea that Rust isn't up to the task of game dev. The grass isn't greener on the Unity side, with a mountain of technical debt holding the engine back. (They're still using Boehm GC in 2024!) Bevy is a breath of fresh air just because it's relatively new and free of legacy. Using Rust instead of C++ is just one part of that. Bevy has a more modern design throughout: for instance, it has a relatively straightforward path to GPU-driven rendering in an integrated system, without having to deal with three incompatible render pipelines (BiRP, HDRP, URP).

What I find more interesting is the parts of the article that boil down to "Rust isn't the best language for rapid development and iteration speed". And that may well be true! I've long thought that the future of Bevy is an integrated Lua scripting layer [1]. You don't even need to get into arguments about the suitability of the borrow checker: it's clear that artists and designers aren't going to be learning Rust anytime soon. I'd like to see a world in which Rust is there for the low-to-mid-level parts that need performance and reliability, and Lua is there for the high-level logic that needs fast iteration, and it's all a nicely integrated whole.

Long-term, I think this world would actually put Bevy in a better place than the existing engines. Unity forces you into C# for basically everything, which is both too low-level for non-programmers to use and too high-level for performance-critical code (unless you have a source license, which no indie developer has). Unreal requires C++, which is even more difficult than Rust (IMO), or Blueprints, which as a visual programming language is way too high-level for anything but the simplest logic. Godot favors GDScript, which is idiosyncratic for questionable gain. I think Rust and Lua (or something similar) would put Bevy in a Goldilocks spot of having two languages that cover all the low-, mid-, and high-level needs well.

As for the other parts of the article, I disagree with the ECS criticism; ECS has some downsides, but the upsides outweigh the downsides in my view. I do agree that Bevy not having an official editor is an ongoing problem that desperately needs fixing. Personally, I would have prioritized the editor way higher earlier in Bevy's development. There is space_editor [2] now, which is something.

[1]: https://github.com/makspll/bevy_mod_scripting

[2]: https://github.com/rewin123/space_editor

So far, there are promising experiments like https://github.com/makspll/bevy_mod_scripting, but nothing's really caught fire in the community yet.

Interesting. Personally I find Rust-only pretty appealing, but people definitely have differing opinions: https://github.com/makspll/bevy_mod_scripting

The release notes can be found here.

I'm not a specialist about text based multiplayer game, but from what I saw on Wikipedia it seem doable to do it with Rust and Bevy. On top of that you can add a layer of LUA with https://github.com/khvzak/mlua (or write your own bindings and sandbox later).

mlua can run on emscripten target with Luau backend -> https://github.com/khvzak/mlua/issues/23

You can also look at the "dependents" section on crates.io https://crates.io/crates/mlua/reverse_dependencies and github https://github.com/khvzak/mlua/network/dependents

I know mlua does support Async. I also prefer it over rlua

Note rlua doesn't allow you to create native modules with it and has largely been superseded by https://github.com/khvzak/mlua since it's more maintained, has native module support and stuff like Luau and async/await.

I'm glad to announce first mlua version 0.8.0-beta.1 with Roblox Luau support.

I believe mlua [0] is the recommended Lua Rust binding now.

[0] https://github.com/khvzak/mlua

This is achieved through a backend/client architecture -- all core functionality (getting query results, opening selected item, search engine fallback, etc.) is implemented in a "backend" module, which is a Rust library exposed as a Lua module via mlua. The results returned by the backend then get fed into your fuzzy-finder of choice through thin clients, or "providers".