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Comment by alimnes | Hacker News Reader

> Rust game development feels like a solution looking for a problem to fix.

The same can be said for ordinary CRUD backends. Java, C#, Go and Typescript (Node, Deno or Bun) are all memory safe with good type systems and more than good enough performance. Evangelism around Rust is unfortunately still a thing. A good example is the latest hype in the community because some Google Manager said at a Rust conference that writing Rust is as fast as writing Go. Anyone having done more than a toy program in Rust and Go knows how wrong this statement is. The reasons are given in the article.

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When single bug may cost millions of dollars, then Rust is cheaper and faster than Go. Google manager is not a liar.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Especially given that Rust is an immediate upgrade with no downsides when moving away from C or C++. It is easy to see with people never wanting to go back, which also involves getting companies and products to adopt it as you would otherwise be forced by the market to work with inferior tools.

As a counterexample, .NET suffers a lot from the lack of evangelism - big chunk of community that started out back in .net framework days still thinks of it as poorly as people outside the ecosystem because they never bothered to drop old and obsolete tools and targets and give new versions a proper try (as the code is often vastly simplified and performance is vastly better).

Other programming languages, not only Rust, also do better at self promotion - take for example Go that managed to convince everyone to put it in the same bucket as Rust (which, personally, I find absolutely insulting as C# is a much closer alternative to Rust both in performance, features and access to low-level bits).

I mean, if we are allowed to lie in order to promote Rust, why don't we just smear all the C/C++ code bases in the world as security hazard needed to be sorted out ASAP?

Unless we already do...

I doubt security is the matter everyone is concerned with but rather the quality of tooling and developer experience.

It is, of course, difficult to convey to developers who only experienced C and C++ build systems, or Ruby tooling and brittleness, or Python way of managing dependencies, or setting up the packaging when using Java, that fast and easy to use solutions do not come from trade-offs but from just better ways of doing so - using cargo and Rust or dotnet and C# is night and day difference compared to options listed above.

I said it here in the past and will say it again: it's not that Rust (or .NET for that matter) are that good, it's a lot of other popular languages and platforms are that bad at one or another aspect (or many at the same time), that make it sufficiently painful to never tolerate a downgrade when you worked with a tool that offers better all-around experience.

I value good tooling as much as the next software engineer. We have good IDEs, build systems, package managers in Java and .NET lands; but we also have a decent environment of established, well-maintained libraries and frameworks.

Rust is deemed to have good tooling, but the third-party library ecosystem is following the NPM/RubyGems culture with all the fragmented dependencies, plus the added complexity of compile times due to lack of ABI compatibility.

Meanwhile, monolithic projects like Tokio also keep strengthening their reign among the small peasant crates.

I'm learning Rust, after decades of various languages with garbage collector, and I believe in the language itself and its tooling. But everything else about Rust irks me.

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