Can any console game devs give me some insight on the state of using Rust on consoles? My understanding is that Unreal has replaced some code with Rust, so it must be doable yes?
@fuzzybinary so here's what I know - I do not know of any parts of unreal engine that are written in Rust, and I feel like that's the sort of thing I would have heard about quickly if there were. A quick google shows there is a 3rd party module that exposes bindings for stuff to Rust via the C FFI, and it's not in a state the author considers to be usable.
@fuzzybinary The way you know if a language or an engine or so is available on consoles is usually that there's a secret branch available where all of the porting work has happened that they can't release for contractual reasons, so it's advertised as being available upon request to registered console developers. I've heard of no such thing for Rust.
@aeva Thanks -- I'm curious if system level languages are a bit easier than things like C# / Mono, especially as a lot of them use Clang as the back end now. Then it's just a question of how OS / Platform specific their standard library is.
@fuzzybinary Correct. It may some day be possible, but someone who has access to all the SDKs would need to put in a significant amount of work to port and maintain the language.
@aeva I seem to remember @Migueldeicaza pointed me to folks doing Swift on consoles.... I was hoping Rust would be in a similar situation but I guess not.
Miguel - do you happen to know the current state of Swift for this?
@fuzzybinary fwiw here's the ways I see it coming to pass:
a Rust game engine project whose developers make games with the engine to prove out features makes something that's successful on PC and decides to invest development time into porting to consoles.
@fuzzybinary 2. a contracting studio that specializes in ports and weird moonshot projects anticipates Rust game development will be a gold mine and does the work in hopes that they can sell it in the future for $$$, and then enough demand actually materializes for the platform branches to continue to be maintained
@fuzzybinary for better or for worse the rub here is games are already very labor intensive to make, and the quality bar is so high. Any emerging language community that wants to angle in for game development needs to make iteration times faster to really catch on. Not on paper, not in theory, but in practice. Rust can probably get there once it amasses enough high quality libraries, but from everything I've heard it's not quite there yet.
@aeva I think the main question that's still in my mind for MY specific use case (which is a supplemental SDK) is whether it's the language that's the challenge or binding to the stdlib or other system calls.
e.g., if I build a .so / .dll in Rust with no_std is that going to be fine?
@fuzzybinary 3. an enterprising studio puts in the work, successfully ships a game, and the game is successful enough that the studio can continue to justify making games like that; and they're willing to share with other registered devs
@fuzzybinary 4. a significant amount of commercially successful PC titles written in Rust emerge, enough so that console vendors notice that there's money to be made in maintaining an official compiler fork
@aeva@fuzzybinary There was a 3rd party effort to integrate it a couple of years ago but I don’t think it went anywhere.
I think this is good reading if you’re considering getting into it https://loglog.games/blog/leaving-rust-gamedev/. I get the impression that people using Rust for gamedev are in danger of prioritising love for Rust over gamedev productivity
@sinbad@aeva Yeah, I actually wouldn't consider it for full game dev. I feel like Engine dev is a good fit with a higher level language for the "game" part. In my current use case, the SDK is not game specific.
Basically (and, public company disclaimer, we are not comitting to actually doing this), we're investigating what a native version of Datadog's logging / monitoring SDK would look like. We want to use Rust, but don't want to shoot ourselves in the foot for engine / platform support.
@sinbad@aeva We think (but I REALLY want confirmation) that we can build a Rust SDK with a C API into a dynamic library and then support desktop, consoles, Unity, etc.... but I REALLY want confirmation from someone before we go too far down that path.
@fuzzybinary@sinbad It might be worth contacting someone at chucklefish who is familiar with what it took to port the language and see if they're willing to comment privately on the issues you're likely to encounter. Without solid information or access to the NDA stuff you're probably better off sticking to C++20 or older and providing a thin Rust wrapper.
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