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Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

Disclaimer: This post is a very long collection of thoughts and problems I've had over the years, and also addresses some of the arguments I've been repeatedly told. This post expresses my opinion the has been formed over using Rust for gamedev for many thousands of hours over many years, and multiple finished games.

Now comes a magic solution that gets rid of all these problems, generational arenas, as best shown by thunderdome, which by the way is a library I'd highly recommend as it's small and lightweight and does what it's supposed to while keeping its codebase readable, the last point being quite rare in the Rust ecosystem. As this article aims to remain technical I don't see much value in explaining the drama in detail or trying to take sides, because while all those are of varying importance to different people, practically the consensus in the community is that there is no more compile time reflection in sight in the near future, which is incredibly sad for everyone involved with the language. In game code one ends up having to wrap things in a Mutex<T> or AtomicRefCell<T> not to "avoid issues they'd run into otherwise if they were writing C++ and forgot to synchronize access", but rather just to satisfy the compiler's all encompassing desire to make everything threadsafe, even when there isn't a single thread::spawn in the whole codebase.

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