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Rant: Entity systems and the Rust borrow checker ... or something.

Jonathan Blow · 304.1K views · 2018-09-14 · 1:01:51

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Overview

Jonathan Blow's hour-long livestreamed response to a RustConf 2018 closing keynote about entity systems in Rust. He argues that index-based entity systems amount to manual memory management that sidesteps the borrow checker, and he talks about friction for game developers.

On Hacker News

It is the standard citation in HN arguments over Rust for game development, the borrow checker and ECS designs, as a skeptical view from an experienced game developer.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2018–2025

Topics

C, C++, Rust, Go & systems languagesGame programming & enginesProgramming language design
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rustborrow checkerentity component systemgame programmingmemory management

What people said

colund · 2024-04 · Recommendation

I find that Jonathan Blow ranting about Rust game development here [VIDEO] . He adds interesting perspectives to the discussio, how the language makes the Rust game developer resort to arrays and their so called Rust point of views.

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hertzrat · 2022-09 · Recommendation

These discussions always remind me of some talks by Jonathan blow where he argues rust doesn’t solve the hard problems he needed it to. There are podcast episodes with better discussions, but the main one people link to seems to be this I haven’t used rust, but I sympathize with his problems with pointers and learned a lot from the various ways people try to solve them [VIDEO]

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gravypod · 2020-02 · Recommendation

Pointers living through a render pass aren't the main use case he is interested in. It's a problem space that many engineers are familiar with so it's easy to talk about. Game developers have some very domain-specific problems that are less common outside of game engines. A more detailed description of his opinions are laid out here where he goes into much more detail about his experiences porting The Witness to mobile (I think): [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Jonathan Blow, played through YouTube.

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