gdext VS rust-gpu

As an alternative, you can code in C++ or C#. If desired, Godot has bindings for other languages, such as Rust. Going ahead—in the end, C++ came in handy and useful for the project.

The world has moved on though to opinionated tools, and Rust isn't even the furthest in that direction (That would be Go). The equivalent of those two lines in Cargo.toml would be this example of a basic configuration from the jacoco-maven-plugin: https://www.jacoco.org/jacoco/trunk/doc/examples/build/pom.x... - That's 40 lines in the section to do the "defaults".

Yes, you could add a load of config for files to include/exclude from coverage and so on, but the idea that that's a norm is way more common in Java projects than other languages. Like here's some example Cargo.toml files from complicated Rust projects:

Servo: https://github.com/servo/servo/blob/main/Cargo.toml

rust-gdext: https://github.com/godot-rust/gdext/blob/master/godot-core/C...

ripgrep: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/blob/master/Cargo.toml

socketio: https://github.com/1c3t3a/rust-socketio/blob/main/socketio/C...

Starting with Godot 4.0, they now support GDExtension which allows you to basically write your own game code in C++ (and other languages), then have the engine import your code: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/scripting/g.... There is also a set of Rust bindings that utilize GDExtension too: https://github.com/godot-rust/gdext.

They might be worth looking into.

Godot currently has 2 versions, the 3.X LTS version has a different api for which rust support ist fully there, that version is I think like 6months old and quite mature. The timeline for GDExtention Rust is difficult to predict but this is the status: https://github.com/godot-rust/gdext/issues/24

Adding onto this, I successfully written a game in Godot using gdnative / gdext. I started with a split approach using gdscript and rust for CPU intensive but found that the API layer was slow at transferring large amounts of data (serialization?). I ended up rewriting it in all rust and it worked like a charm. I was able to target native and web assembly, the web assembly was much slower but worked on the browser.

You can always port performance-sensitive parts of your code later to C#, or even Rust using GDExtension modules: https://github.com/godot-rust/gdext

I’ve recently switched from my own custom game engine written in Rust to Godot and want to use my knowledge in Rust to create game logic. I’ve looked at the book for godot-rust and can’t figure out how to use it properly. My goal is to write Rust code and implement it as a script in Godot 4.

To add to your point, here’s also godot-rust if you want something semi-native in godot

Sounds cool, but this requires yet another language to learn[0]. As someone who only has limited knowledge in this space, could someone tell me how comparable is the compute functionality of rust-gpu[1], where I can just write rust?

[0] https://github.com/Hugobros3/shady#language-syntax

[1] https://github.com/EmbarkStudios/rust-gpu

I don't do anything related to data science, but I feel like doing it in Rust would be nice.

You get operator overloading, so you can have ergonomic matrix operations that are typed also. Processing data on the CPU is fast, and crates like https://github.com/EmbarkStudios/rust-gpu make it very ergonomic to leverage the GPU.

I like this library for creating typed coordinate spaces for graphics programming (https://github.com/servo/euclid), I imagine something similar could be done to create refined types for matrices so you don't do matrix multiplication matrices of invalid sizes

Do you mean rust-gpu?

And https://github.com/EmbarkStudios/rust-gpu/tree/main/examples with the wgpu runner (here it runs the compute shader)

I don't know how major they are considered, but Embark Studios is doing quite a bit of Rust in the open source space, most notably (IMO) rust-gpu and kajiya

The examples in the rust-gpu repository are a good place to start

There's another project that's similar that's being used by an actual game company: https://github.com/EmbarkStudios/rust-gpu

They see specific advantages here that would outweigh that negative. It's not my space (I play games, but know next to nothing about graphics programming), but there's at least one argument in the other direction.

Could this approach work for compute shaders (GPGPU) as well? So far, I think https://github.com/EmbarkStudios/rust-gpu is the state of the art in that area, but it adds a specific Rust compiler backend for generating SPIR-V rather than leaving that up to the driver. That seems more complicated than it needs to be... but maybe it has advantages too? Thoughts?

https://github.com/embarkstudios/rust-gpu Allows you to create shaders (kernals) in Rust.

Also Embark Studios (formers DICE people) is doing a lot of work with Rust, all open source like Rust GPU https://github.com/EmbarkStudios/rust-gpu