Migrating Away from Rust
a year ago
- #Game Development
- #Rust
- #Unity
- The author initially chose Rust and Bevy for game development due to personal interest and the joy of using Rust, along with Bevy's ECS model and open community.
- Despite positive experiences, practical challenges led to a switch to C# and Unity in January 2025, including collaboration difficulties, abstraction issues, and migration burdens.
- Key problems included onboarding a new coder to Rust, rapid iteration challenges, API thrash in Bevy updates, and limitations in modding and AI-assisted development.
- A cost-benefit analysis led to experimenting with Unity, where core features were implemented much faster, demonstrating improved collaboration and iteration speed.
- After a successful three-day test, the team fully migrated to Unity, resulting in faster development, reduced code verbosity, and better maintainability.
- The author reflects on failing to fairly evaluate alternatives initially but concludes the switch was necessary for the project's success, though still values Rust and Bevy for other projects.