RustConf 2018 - Closing Keynote - Using Rust For Game Development by Catherine West
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN treats it as the go-to explanation of ECS, valuable even for people who don't use Rust.
What it is
Catherine West's RustConf 2018 closing keynote on building a game in Rust and organizing a large codebase. It builds up an entity component system and generational indices step by step.
Recommended by 9 HN commenters across 9 different months, 2018 to 2023.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec monocasa · 2018-11 · on “Still in love with Rust”
There was a great talk recently about how to properly build an entity component framework in Rust if you haven't seen it yet. [this video]
Strong rec atoav · 2019-03 · on “Case Study: Npm uses Rust for its CPU-bound bottlenecks [pdf]”
It depends, I am over a year in Rust and it doesn't take me that much longer to write something in it than say in Python. The confidence I have that the thing I wrote is way higher in Rust and it is usually much faster. And: it is incredible easy to build and deploy. I think whether Rust is useful or not depends entirely on the application. If you need high confidence in what the thing is doing, it should run parallel and fast and you are familiar with the concepts Rust is using – it isn't a bad choice. For me it replaced Python in nearly every domain except one-use scripts and scientific stuff. It can be hard for advanced programmers to abandon certain patterns they bring from other languag
Strong rec oconnor663 · 2021-06 · on “Zig 0.8.0 Release Notes”
This is basically what an Entity Component System is, right? I always find myself linking back to this talk: [this video]
Strong rec andrewflnr · 2022-09 · on “I learned to love testing game code”
This Rust conference talk, of all things, is still my favorite ECS explanation, because she builds the concept piece by piece starting from megaclass-hell to full entities-as-IDs with reasons for each step. Also she's a pretty entertaining speaker IMO. [this video]
Strong rec estebank · 2023-08 · on “A half-hour to learn Rust”
If you're looking for something with a narrative you can watch, the RustConf 2018 closing keynote [this video] is a great talk that has an overview on "generational arenas", which are effectively "just" a vector with a custom index type that holds the "pointed-to" generation, and the stored values also store their generation inline. This allows: all objects to be stored in a contiguous block of memory (increasing the likelihood of "pointer-chasing" style of code to have the pointed to value warm in cache, significantly speeding them up), allows relocation (because you're no longer dealing with pointers, but rather offsets to the beginning of the pointer), and doesn't have the pointer invalidation
Recommends faitswulff · 2018-12 · on “Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?”
I rather enjoyed RustConf 2018's Closing Keynote, "Using Rust For Game Development" by Catherine West: [this video] I learned about the ECS pattern and got to see some Rust refactoring in action. Previous HN discussion here: [LINK]
Recommends nabakin · 2020-11 · on “Why Rust Is the Future of Game Development”
Chucklefish, the developer of Starbound, uses Rust too. The lead dev on the project gave a great presentation [1] at RustConf. [1] [this video]
Recommends hectorlorenzo · 2021-02 · on “Are we game yet? – A guide to the Rust game development ecosystem”
I just recently came across these two videos. Using Rust For Game Development by Catherine West: [this video] Counter-rant from Jonathan Blow: [LINK]