gdnative VS arewegameyet

It's a little less standard use, but Godot has been used to build application guis, which could be paired with rust bindings to implement app logic. I can't speak to reproducibility/scalability, but Godot's ui is extremely solid, and I'd probably choose that over Bevy until Bevy's ui progress matures.

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.

Check this: https://github.com/tomuxmon/bevy_roguelike if you are still into bevy. Scheduling is a bit bork and I have not found time to port it to latest bevy. But most of the systems should work fine(if used on latest bevy). But again. If you want faster result go with something like Godot. In fact, just go with Godot. It is mature, easy to start, no lock in(free and MIT license), a lot of learning material. Also with Godot you can also use Rust https://godot-rust.github.io/. Ditch Unity (do not have time to explain 😅). Have fun!

Bevy Godot-Rust

> Same for Godot.

While likely true that it's "Unlikely to ever be as supported" as the 4 officially supported languages[0] ("GDScript, C#, and, via its GDExtension technology, C and C++."), Godot's GDExtension technology is specifically intended for use in adding support for other languages.

The most relevant tracking issue for Rust is presumably:

* <https://github.com/godot-rust/gdnative/issues/824>

Which links to:

* <https://github.com/godot-rust/gdextension>

[0] https://docs.godotengine.org/en/4.0/getting_started/step_by_...

...Godot v3.x has Rust support via godot-rust and Godot v4.0 is released as of this month?

I was curious, and looked it up. Nothing built in, but there's an interesting project that works with godot: https://godot-rust.github.io/

There's people working on it: https://godot-rust.github.io/

arewegameyet

"While the ecosystem is still very young, you can find enough libraries and game engines to sink your teeth into doing some slightly experimental gamedev."

I think Rust for games has come really far. I will cite https://arewegameyet.rs/ "Almost. We have the blocks, bring your own glue.".

All the blocks are there and the language is really well suited to games.

On top of my head:

The pros:

- The crate ecosystem and the package manager makes it really easy to integrate any useful component such as pathfinding, spatial partitioning, graphics backend, audio system.. Most crates take a lot of effort to be cross-platform so I can develop on linux and not spend too much time debugging windows releases.

- The strong typing and algebraic data types makes expressing the game state very pleasant. I also found I was able to develop a very big game without too many bugs even though I don't write many tests.

- Ahead of time compilation + LLVM guarantees you won't have to optimise for weird things around a virtual machine. Rust gives you more control to optimise hot loops as you can go low-level.

- I find wgpu to be the perfect balance between ergonomics and power compared to Vulkan. OpenGL support through wgpu is also a nice addition for lower end devices.

- The Rust community is very helpful, you can often talk directly to crate maintainers

The cons:

- Compilation times, when compared to JITed languages such as C# can be very painful. It can be alleviated by buying a 3950X but I still often get 10-30s iteration times.

- The static nature of Rust means you often need a dynamism layer above to tweak stuff that can be awkward to manage. I made inline_tweak for this purpose but it's really far from how easy Unity makes it. https://github.com/Uriopass/inline_tweak

- Since Rust feels very ergonomic, you are tempted to write almost all game logic within it, so mod support feels very backwards to implement as you cannot really tweak "everything" like in Unity games. Thankfully "Systems" game like Factorio or Egregoria can be theoretically split into the "simulation" and the "entities" so mod can still have a great impact. Factorio is built in C++ so has the same problematic. Their Lua API surface is quite insane to be able to hook into everything. https://lua-api.factorio.com/latest/

Now, I have to talk about Bevy: https://bevyengine.org/. It did not exist when I started but it is a revolution in the Rust gamedev space. It is a very powerful 100% Rust game engine that makes you write game code in Rust too. It has incredible energy behind it and I feel like if I'd used Bevy from the start I wouldn't have had to develop many core engine systems. Its modular design is also incredibly pleasant as you can just replace any part you don't like with your own.

For practical uses of Rust? Whatever you want to program. People use Rust for game development, GUIs, web dev, and more. Anything where abstraction, speed, concurrency, memory safety, etc. are important, Rust will probably be a good fit.

Are we game yet? "Almost. We have the blocks, bring your own glue"

Not seeing anything else that's close to photo realistic. I'm hitting the tough bugs first all too often. More than half my time has been spent on ecosystem problems.

I also know of https://arewegameyet.rs/

Yes — and in fact, Firefox's implementation has been the go-to graphics API for folks trying to make Rust gamedev happen for a long time now. Bevy Engine's renderer is built on it, for example.

They're all/mostly websites about the state of the Rust language ecosystem. For example, can you write games in Rust (https://arewegameyet.rs/) or what's the state of the async (https://areweasyncyet.rs/)