[csande17]

Rust is great for when you're writing a serious, security-critical program that can't have any memory-corruption bugs or data races. It makes writing programs a little more challenging, and sometimes you sacrifice a bit of runtime performance compared to C, but it's often worth it.

But Game Boy Advance games don't really fit that description. GBA games don't accept untrusted input, and nothing bad happens if they're "compromised". (Like, when people discovered arbitrary code execution in Super Mario World, no one was worried about the security implications.) So languages like C or Zig that let you cowboy values directly into specific memory locations can be a better choice.

I'm excited about Zig in particular because the mission statement seems to be "C but nicer" -- you get the same basic programming model, but with things like instance methods, generic types, better macros, arbitrary-bit-integer types and a "crash when hitting undefined behavior" compile mode.

[shpongled]

Idk, I use Rust wherever I would use any other programming language, but I'm also a huge fan of the language in general. There's no need to limit it to "serious" applications

[saagarjha]

> nothing bad happens if they're "compromised"

It can make debugging your program a lot harder :)

[OatMilkLatte]

On the contrary - when people discovered an ACE bug in Super Mario World, they PogChamp'd.

[Jyaif]

> GBA games don't accept untrusted input

You have a very narrow definition of untrusted input.

[swiley]

Arbitrary code execution isn’t that big a deal when one of the features of the device is that it accepts a ram image over its synchronous serial port which is jumped into after being received.