OT: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

[Dukc]

On Friday, 26 April 2024 at 18:41:11 UTC, ryuukk_ wrote:
> https://loglog.games/blog/leaving-rust-gamedev/
>
> Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40172033
>
> We should encourage these people to check out D

This reminds me of my experience of converting a simple 
imperative-style Monte-Carlo simulation program from D to 
Haskell, to learn and test the limits of the latter.

It took far more time than writing the D program.

Contrary to the stereotype, Haskell can 100% imperative 
programming and raw mutable arrays. With the right library 
abstractions, it's even good at that. But, to do that efficiently 
you have to be experienced and understand a lot of abstractions 
inside out.

This is because the language primitives are immutable and pure 
mathematics-style entities, I/O and mutability is treated as a 
special library abstraction. At least in principle, I feel it's 
the correct way to go about things. Pure code is the recommended 
default in pretty much any language after all, when there is no 
specific reason to do otherwise.

But man does that steepen the learning curve for some tasks. 
Ironically, you don't need to know monads nearly as well to excel 
pipes-and-filters-style programming as you have to excel with 
mutable arrays.

That's what Haskell is like: you have to jump through many hoops 
to understand how you can get things done, but when you finally 
do the solution is almost without fail extremely powerful and 
to-the-book, and usually there is a solution no matter what 
you're trying to achieve. By the way, that also what Nix package 
manager is like, compared to the traditional alternatives.

To me the article reads like Rust is pretty similar. Whether 
that's a good or a bad thing, comes mostly down to preference.