FOSS game engine written in Rust 'Bevy' has a new release up

I wonder if Rust led to some performance advantages or disadvantages, in comparison to C. I saw some people hell bent in making everything in Rust, regardless if it is the best tool for the job or not.

I wonder if Rust led to some performance advantages or disadvantages, in comparison to C. I saw some people hell bent in making everything in Rust, regardless if it is the best tool for the job or not.

If the ecosystem is big enough rust is (nearly) always (in my opinion) the better choice over c if the programmers are fluent in rust.
The performance is with the right abstraction on par with c/c++ and the abstractions are more readable and maintainable once you learn rust. But this is ofcourse a chicken egg problem. Someone has to start expanding the ecosystem, so yes if you want to say they "hell bent" but with the rising popularity, i think this are logical steps people make.

At this rate we're going to have a Bevy of open source game engines.

Looks cool. Is it using Vulkan underneath?

I wonder if Rust led to some performance advantages or disadvantages, in comparison to C. I saw some people hell bent in making everything in Rust, regardless if it is the best tool for the job or not.

I've seen some saying that Rust can provide performance benefits that are hard to reach in C due to easier way of parallelizing things and avoiding race conditions bugs. Rust compiler can do some optimizations due to safety guarantees that C/C++ compilers can't.

Looks cool. Is it using Vulkan underneath?

I think it uses wgpu-rs as the backend, which itself has a number of rendering API backends. As I recall, it was defaulting to Vulkan but also had some kind of a GL backend, but I remember that being experimental/in-dev.

I've been thinking about learning Rust since hearing about it near the start of this year, and making a simple game would probably be a great way to throw myself into the deep end. Bevy definitely sounds interesting for the purpose!

I wonder if Rust led to some performance advantages or disadvantages, in comparison to C. I saw some people hell bent in making everything in Rust, regardless if it is the best tool for the job or not.

I've seen some saying that Rust can provide performance benefits that are hard to reach in C due to easier way of parallelizing things and avoiding race conditions bugs. Rust compiler can do some optimizations due to safety guarantees that C/C++ compilers can't.

Yes all these myths are being repeated on the internet over and over.
The only thing rust can avoid is one special case during multi-threading, the data race. Race conditions are still very well possible for rather obvious reasons. Parallelization still remains a non-trivial task that needs appropriate skills of a programmer.
Also, C is for sure not the "competitor" when we are talking about game engines. There is no speed or other advantage to be expected from Rust. The point of this language is rather to avoid common bugs that are memory management related.
If you want advanced memory control, Rust does not even allow you to do that in a reasonable fashion, so this convenience comes with a price..

@aristorias: all of that is pretty wrong, but if you want proper sources and not myths, go find what actual developers say. I wouldn't touch C for big projects if Rust is an option.


Last edited by Shmerl on 28 December 2020 at 5:14 pm UTC

@aristorias: all of that is pretty wrong, but if you want proper sources and not myths, go find what actual developers say. I wouldn't touch C for big projects if Rust is an option.

Listen, I've been doing professional software engineering for the past 20 years and I therefore know very well what I am talking about ;-). Do you? Or maybe you got a language barrier there, I can't tell.

Listen, I've been doing professional software engineering for the past 20 years and I therefore know very well what I am talking about ;-). Do you? Or maybe you got a language barrier there, I can't tell.

I don't know for how long you have been doing it, but you sounded pretty clueless about Rust above.


Last edited by Shmerl on 29 December 2020 at 5:22 pm UTC

@aristorias: all of that is pretty wrong, but if you want proper sources and not myths, go find what actual developers say. I wouldn't touch C for big projects if Rust is an option.

Oh. I see a lot of half truths and misconceptions are being mixed together and form some alternate kind of parallel universe n this forum.
The mentioning of C here is totally out of place. The strength of C is low level systems programming and absolutely irrelevant for game engine programming. (C++ is a different language!) - As the poster above already said.
Also, using Rust does not automatically make a software product faster than the same software written in language X. There are countless little artificial benchmarks that claim to show some advantage over some other random language. In reality however, Rust like any other language is bound to the constraints of information technology and if there is an advantage over something else, then this is bought be some other "disadvantage". In quotes - because in the end it's only about personal taste (or almost religious belief for some) for which language you settle down. A proof that in special case Y language X is faster than Z, is utterly irrelevant in complex software products were mostly architectural design decisions are responsible for the performance.
Rust also cannot avoid race conditions, for that the compiler must execute the program and be aware of its edge cases and then judge smartly - that's simply impossible. Data races however, can be avoided at compile time and is a rather trivial case and got much more glory than it's worth it on the internet .... The potentially security relevant bugs that can be avoided with this language are not necessarily relevant for games and come with the consequence that Rust made memory allocation more abstract.
Long story short, Rust does not revolutionize the game development at all and will co-exist with countless other languages which are already established ...

bisher: Anything can be relevant, it's the question of what's better. As I said, I don't see C as being better for making games or anything that Rust can do as well.

Those who claim C is better never dealt with the horrors of oversized projects that try to stretch C limitations in bizarre ways because the language is so antiquated and limited by today's standards.

And the second point - I'm totally not interested in proving this. It's not about personal taste, it's about progress of languages design. If you don't get it - good, you'll get it eventually. If not - keep using C if it suits you. That won't stop others from criticizing it.


Last edited by Shmerl on 29 December 2020 at 11:20 pm UTC