The game engine segment is much like the operating system segment - the size, momentum/inertia of the incumbents (ie. UE4, Unity as an analog to Linux, Windows etc) make it rather difficult for new entrants, especially for ones written in languages that are not as popular as C or C++ (eg. Rust).

It's simply too hard right now to find enough programmers proficient in Rust who could assemble a competing product, IMHO.

I'm excited to see what happens with Embark Studios; EA SEED started using Rust for stuff, and Embark is a new studio founded by some ex-DICE/SEED folks that's doing everything in Rust. There's also Ready at Dawn and Chucklefish...

Chucklefish 2D games or what have you are a far cry (no pun intended) away from a high performance 3D engine like Unreal though. And from what I can find on EA SEED they are mostly using it for server side and pipeline stuff, rather than the primary rendering engines for their 3D games. I'd love to stand corrected if this isn't the case.

Don't get me wrong, I'm optimistic, and I'd like to see it happen. Although I was a C/C++ holdout at first, I'm starting to come around to the Rust way of thinking, even if I don't like a lot of the terminology and the "RIIR" crowd are completely annoying.

Oh yeah, I don’t mean to imply chucklefish is AAA.

I don’t have a ton of info about SEED, pretty much

https://twitter.com/gwihlidal/status/1065036212220698624 says

> Halcyon itself is still largely C++, but a lot of data pipelines and servers are written with rust, and quite a few rendering experiments, as well. Enough pieces are being developed to build up enough critical mass for 3D, though!

and https://twitter.com/repi/status/1031877154261422080

> Nope, but our next revision of Halcyon is built using Rust

but Embark claims that all their stuff is Rust-first. There’s some other rumblings at other places, but they’re just that, rumblings. As I said, excited to see what happens; it hasn’t happened yet!

And yeah, RIIR is annoying for sure.

That's great to see even if it's still early days. Thank you also for being a great proponent for the Rust community, your thoughtful and considered answers here have helped convince me to look into Rust more over the longer term, whereas the foam-at-the-mouth types completely send me in the other direction.

So the Ready at Dawn folks just put this out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-txrCMvdms&feature=youtu.be

... this is one of the most interesting introductions to a Rust package that I've ever seen.

Yes I saw that not long after our discussion. Definitely interesting stuff and I agree, marvelously presented.

You're quite welcome, and thanks for the thanks.

Honest question: for these performance critical things, how good are compilers for Rust, Go etc. compared to modern C/C++ compilers? One reason that Fortran is still so heavily used in HPC is the quality of the compilers.

The Rust compiler uses LLVM, and so fares roughly as well as clang.

Not that I am really qualified to comment on these things, since I don't program in Rust, Go or FORTRAN, but AFAIK the one thing that is often claimed to prevent languages reaching C/C++ performance levels is garbage collection, which Rust doesn't have (but Go does).

As we all know benchmarks need to be taken with a handful of salt since the publisher often has a vested interest in pushing one point of view or another for monetary or whatever reasons.

My personal view is that until we see a AAA game engine or mainstream operating system that is able to run a comparable suite of software to Windows/Linux written in Rust or Go, we won't really know if these languages (or implementations thereof) are going to be suitable for these things.