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Copy file name to clipboardExpand all lines: content/posts/survey-01/index.md
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@@ -3,16 +3,19 @@ title = "Rust Game Development - Ecosystem Survey"
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In August last year, we conducted a survey for the Rust gamedev ecosystem. After an unfortunate delay, we can finally present the results. We received a whopping 403 responses!
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## Hobbyist or developer?
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In August last year, we conducted a survey for the Rust gamedev ecosystem. After an unfortunate delay, we can finally present the results. We received a whopping 403 responses! This trove of valuable feedback will inform the WG's roadmap for 2020.
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# Hobbyist or developer?
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Out of the 400 respondents, 3/4 identified as a _Hobbyist_. It should also be noted that a significant portion of the self-identified _Professionals_ are more accurately described as "aspiring professional" undertaking their first game development venture. That still amounts to a large amount of commercial interest in Rust game development all the same!
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##Are you using Rust for gamedev?
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# Are you using Rust for gamedev?
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Among the Professionals only 1/4 said they are currently using Rust in games. That means the 200 respondents currently using Rust for gamedev are mostly hobbyists. No surprise there, as most professionals can't bear the risk of being an early adopter. Big shoutout to all the hobbyists who are pushing the status quo, and kudos to the handful of studios that are using Rust in production long before most of their industry peers have even caught the scent.
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---
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For the free-form answers that follow, a basic sentiment analysis was used to distill 400 replies into digestible form. The "III" signs underneath a heading indicate *roughly* the number of times that topic came up. Think of it as the **signal strength** of a given topic.
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_For the free-form answers that follow, a basic eyeballs&hands sentiment analysis was used to distill 400 replies into digestible form. The (#) number next to a heading indicate roughly the number of times that topic came up. Think of it as the **signal strength** of a given topic._
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## What about Rust as a language and ecosystem presents the biggest NEGATIVES for you as a game developer right now?
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* From playing in the space I know it's possible to make games using Rust. However in the ecosystem my biggest negatives is the [lack of] case studies and demonstrations of it working.
* Prototyping seems not as easy in Rust due to "fighting the compiler"
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### Documentation
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### Documentation (43)
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* Not enough documentation to get past beginner stage
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* Lacking examples for gamedev libs.
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* Documentation is usually either high level or examples but rarely both. Very few real world examples to draw from.
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### Lack of full-featured engines
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### Lack of full-featured engines (35)
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* Lack of a data-and-script based engine like Unreal Engine or Unity means even small projects end up feeling very bring-your-own-engine.
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* Missing graphical editors, frictionless prototyping of games
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### Rust learning curve / onboarding to a niche language
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### Rust learning curve / onboarding to a niche language (29)
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* The language has a higher upfront cognitive load than any other mainstream language I know of, mostly due to the borrow checker. It's very hard to hack through stuff and get away with it, which makes it a particularly hard sell for game prototypes.
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* I know that it is a less common language to use so as a company I will have to have my staff learn Rust before they can start.
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* Rust could be tricky to hire for, and hiring someone who doesn't know Rust to work in Rust will come with a ramp-up period.
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### IDE/RLS story
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### IDE/RLS story (28)
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Tooling around IDE is limited compared to Visual Studio with C++ or C#.´
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- debug mode way too slow, often need to set opt-level=1 or 2 for dev profile
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### GUI tooling
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### GUI tooling (23)
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* As a tools developer, a major negative point is the current absence of a reliable GUI framework (we use WPF + C# with Visual Studio).
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### Game consoles
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### Game consoles (13)
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* No first party support for console development makes Rust a tough sell for a lot of professional work.
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* Rust is not officially supported on console by Sony or Microsoft.
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* Rust can't be seriously considered yet, because it does not have support from the PS4 SDK. Although there are other considerations (studio culture, integration with existing systems, etc.), official support from Sony is a requirement before Rust could be used in a PS4 game.
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### C++ interop
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### Web/mobile support (14)
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### Allocators (10)
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### C++ interop (7)
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Our code, and any middleware/engine that we might license, is in C++. Using Rust and C++ together is painful, and rewriting the existing tech to be purely Rust would be very expensive.
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- Lack of a straightforward path to make rust work easily with C++ in both directions. The only trustable way I see now is through manual C wrappers, which is error-prone and time consuming.
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### Web/mobile support
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### Allocators
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# What about Rust as a language and ecosystem presents the biggest POSITIVES for you as a game developer right now?
* A mature Rust ecosystem will (hopefully!) have a lower bar for entry than a mature C++ ecosystem, without giving up performance.
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### WASM (web) support
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### WASM (web) support (20)
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### No garbage collection
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### No garbage collection (8)
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### ECS; data-driven; data-oriented
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### ECS; data-driven; data-oriented (8)
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### Cross platform
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### Cross platform (5)
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### C interop
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### C interop (3)
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## Selected quotes
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> The language has a higher upfront cognitive load than any other mainstream language. Which means that on an established, bigger project (maybe with a team behind) the productivity is amazing compared to C++! It's much easier to express strong & safe interfaces that make bugs just harder to introduce.
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It really shines in network code that needs to be 100% safe and resist bad actors! My current game server code has 0 unwraps/panics/expects and so I just *know* it can't crash... I wish I could have that feeling in C++.
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## What do you think should be the game-dev working group's priorities for the next 3-6 months?
- Develop contacts within the industry so that the WG can be a liaison between industry and OSS developers. By inviting and involving industry, the ecosystem can grow and potentially receive support (in the form of PRs, open sourcing existing tools, or financial support for OSS developers.)
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- Encourage & facilitate collaboration on existing tools.
- Identify in-progress issues, and propose new issues, for the Rust language, that are relevant to game development. (For example, debug Rust is very slow, so we need good ways to control what is and isn't optimized.)
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- Seek opportunities to address cross-cutting concerns where possible. The recent investigation into raw-window-handle and evaluation of if we can/should converge on a math library are both good examples.
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### First-grade game engine/framework
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### First-grade game engine/framework (46)
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- Simple 2D game engine
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- Basic editor workflow
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- An SDL-like
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- A Unity/Unreal competitor
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### Graphics libraries
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### Graphics libraries (33)
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- Improve accessibility of graphics programming
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### Foundational libraries
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### Foundational libraries (27)
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- UI libraries
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- Windowing
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- Collection of “Standard crates” with some form of WG support
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- Push for stabilisation
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### Faster iteration times
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### Faster iteration times (17)
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- Hot code reloading
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- Scripting
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- Faster compile times
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- More libraries like Processing
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### Integration with existing toolchains
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### Integration with existing toolchains (14)
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- C/C++
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- Xcode, Android studio, Visual studio, Blender
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- Unity/Unreal/Godot
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### Custom allocation story
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### Custom allocation story (10)
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### Debugging support and IDE integration
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### Debugging support and IDE integration (5)
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### Interoperability between libraries
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### Interoperability between libraries (5)
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## Can you name some libraries you are thankful for or take special interest in?
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[graphic pending]
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Just for fun, we asked respondents to name libraries or projects they were thankful for. In the 6 months that have passed since this survey went out there's been quite a few newcomers on the rise that would probably show more prominently here if we asked again today. Rest assured there will be more surveys.
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_Thanks so much to the survey respondents and all the people out there working tirelessly make Rust a first-tier language and ecosystem for game development._
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