wg VS arewegameyet

Inspired by James Munns's call, and as 2023 is coming to an end, I figure it's a good opportunity to reflect and look forward to 2024. It's been a bit over 1.5 years since I embarked on my embedded Rust journey and it's been nothing less than exciting since. So here it goes.

Because you are an embedded guy. There is the https://github.com/rust-embedded/wg working-group. Rust on embedded is really on a got track forward. There are many chips/vendors that are supported both in no std / std rust world, but still there is a lot of niche things where you can actively help to be the first to get it run in Rust.

To specifically answer your question, here:

* <http://www.areweembeddedyet.com/>

It currently redirects to:

* <https://rust-embedded.org>

Which doesn't really contain anything other than a link to <https://github.com/rust-embedded>.

(via <https://github.com/rust-embedded/wg/issues/15>)

Then the Rust Embedded workgroup provides: - Direction on how to using generics and zero-sized types to achieve functional safety - svd2rust, which provides safe abstractions to peripheral access from SVD files and achieves this functional safety - The embedded HAL spec, which makes porting to different vendors/hardware easy - Peripheral access controllers and HALs for various vendors & hardware

The Rust Embedded Devices Working Group curates a list of useful embedded Rust resources, including Peripheral Access Crates (autogenerated from SVD files), embedded-hal Implementation Crates (hand-written libraries implementing the traits (interfaces) specified by the embedded-hal), and Board Support Crates.

You should also look at https://github.com/rust-embedded/wg/issues/41 and https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/55011#issuecomment-429336055.

Here's an interesting discussion, consolidated here. My view is you should use a restricted scope atomic (as best as can be supported) and interact with that through a handler struct. I.e. no global state.

Most of the issues are explained in EWG RFC 419. The TL;DR is that some resources need to implement Send to be usable from interrupts, but they must not be sent across cores.

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/)