What is Rust's potential in game development?

• Fyrox

  63 7,187 9.9 Rust

  3D and 2D game engine written in Rust

  

Besides Bevy there’s also Fyrox Engine that looks very promising. https://fyrox.rs/

• arewegameyet

  99 675 7.0 SCSS

  The repository for https://arewegameyet.rs

  

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• rust-gpu

  82 6,952 7.7 Rust

  🐉 Making Rust a first-class language and ecosystem for GPU shaders 🚧

  

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

• kajiya

  19 4,566 4.4 Rust

  💡 Experimental real-time global illumination renderer 🦀

  

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

• winsafe

  41 439 9.4 Rust

  Windows API and GUI in safe, idiomatic Rust.

Externally, you can write a lot of native Windows stuff in Rust already. Personally, I'm having a lot of fun with WinSafe.

• gecs

  2 97 7.5 Rust

  a generated entity component system 🦎

Sure, if you'll forgive me again for copying over text from a previous post. For context, I'm the author of gecs, which is a compile-time library for generating Entity Component System worlds and performing queries against them during compilation. Over the course of writing this library I encountered a number of limitations of Rust's compile-time capabilities with generics and both declarative and proc macros. Some of them I managed to push through with hacks, but others are simply impossible to solve (at least, as far as I can tell after expending a lot of effort trying) on stable.

• gdnative

  93 3,560 6.4 Rust

  Rust bindings for Godot 3

  

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.

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• gdext

  12 2,427 9.6 Rust

  Rust bindings for Godot 4

  

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.

• FlipFlop

  1 12 10.0 Rust

  A digital logic simulator built on simple rules. (by agausmann)

I've made at least one thing in Rust that can be considered a "game", and so far I have not needed a debugger for it. Instead, I draw text on-screen with diagnostic/debug info about whatever I'm looking/pointing at. If that doesn't provide enough detail/persistence, I can always add tracing/logging, so I can read the logs and follow the state changes and control flow to figure out where the bug is. (And this matches my experience in Python, which is the language I use most at work.)

• blender-tools

  7 392 10.0 Python

  🐵 Embark Addon for Blender

  

• learn-wgpu

  75 1,382 8.0 Rust

  Guide for using gfx-rs's wgpu library.

So my advice would be to try Bevy, but don't force it if it doesn't work for you. If you're interested in more "low-level" graphics programming or you have some experience in that area, then learning wgpu is another thing you can do (and if you start doing advanced things with Bevy, you will want to be familiar with wgpu anyway)

• bevy

  574 32,210 9.9 Rust

  A refreshingly simple data-driven game engine built in Rust

  

If you're just getting started, Bevy seems to be the most popular choice of engine for pure Rust gamedev. I've had a little bit of success with Bevy, but ultimately most of my projects end up being plain wgpu and winit, because I prefer having control over the render pipeline and the structure of my data, and I don't personally benefit much from an ECS.

Suggest a related project