RustConf 2018 - Closing Keynote - Using Rust For Game Development by Catherine West

What people said

estebank · 2023-08 · Strong recommendation

If you're looking for something with a narrative you can watch, the RustConf 2018 closing keynote [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 problem (because the "pointer" now asserts that the pointed to value hasn't changed, and if so return an Err/None). It also has the benefit that because you're not dealing with pointers you don't need to write any unsafe Rust code, out of bound accesses are checked, and the borrow graph becomes simpler because the arena owns all of its contents, instead of having to keep track of the lifetime of borrows at compile time (the famous "fighting with the borrow checker") nor is as "expensive" as the tracking an Arc<RefCell<T>> could be.

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andrewflnr · 2022-09 · Strong recommendation

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. [VIDEO]

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oconnor663 · 2021-06 · Strong recommendation

This is basically what an Entity Component System is, right? I always find myself linking back to this talk: [VIDEO]

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