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by shmerl 2727 days ago
Game developers should start using more Rust.
2 comments

For console development (Sony, Nintendo, XBox), anything but C++ has never seemed like an option because all of the development tools and libraries provided for working on those consoles are C++ centric.

But I'm curious if there are any console development companies that are successfully using Rust or other languages which perhaps can link with C++ libraries?

We use C# in our studio for tools, and are able to link it with our game C++ so that we can run some of the game's subsystems within the tools (e.g. animation engine) but shipping the game with C# code is not an option for several reasons, performance being the most important, but also we need to build our game for the console using CLang/LLVM, and I suspect it's not possible to write C# which interfaces with C++ using LLVM, only with Microsoft's compiler.

For Rust, Chucklefish has written rust for all the current generation of consoles: https://github.com/rust-lang/prev.rust-lang.org/blob/master/...

There are other game companies doing stuff, but we have less details including platform: EA’s SEED division, Ready At Dawn, and Embark (some ex-SEED devs making a new studio where Rust is the primary language.)

Yeah it's an awesome language. Has its downsides (language enforced memory micromanagement is a good thing but can get annoying sometimes.) but it's one of the best we have now. For now i'll stay with my beloved C#.
C# doesn't sound like a good option for games development though (except may be for scripting used in various engines).

It's now dominated by C++ for a good reason, since it requires tight performance control. So Rust is a valid candidate for fixing C++ issues. C# - not really.

+1 for csharp, got to use it in an introductory unity class and fell in love with it.