I mean why else would you want to use C# when there’s Rust 🦀 and all the awesome tooling and libraries around it…
Rust really isn’t all that. Plus C# is used for all kinds of corporate stuff where Rust levels of performance aren’t needed. It’s also used in several other game engines
I’m not speaking for Rust level performance. I’m using Rust nowadays, because it’s generally doing a lot right, that other popular languages struggle with IMO.
Think about error handling. I think even Java is better here than C#. I think it’s quite a mistake, not being required to add all possible exception types that a function can throw to the function signature.
Then the next thing, I really hate about almost every popular language is implicit null. To be really safe, you have to check every (non-primitive) variable for null before using it, otherwise you have a potential NullPointerException.
Then take pattern matching, this is a baked in feature of Rust from the beginning and it does this really well (exhaustive matching etc.). There’s “basic” pattern matching in C#, but it just doesn’t really feel right in the language, and is not even close in capability compared to Rusts.
All of this (and more) makes Rust the less error-prone language, which I can say with confidence after long experience with both of these languages (both > 5 years).
I’m honestly not sure why exactly C was chosen for most of the games, but it’s probably because it’s relatively good to embed, is relatively strong-typed, while being somewhat performant (compared to something like python or other scripting languages).
Security, performance and most importantly, security. .net updates every week to address security vulnerabilities, stability and enhancements. While the language is lower you just can’t overstate poorly c# lasts. C# Deprecation and dated code make for a pretty high maintenance and frustrating ecosystem at the best of time.
It being updated frequently just shows it’s being regularly maintained and improved.
C# has many of the same security and safety advantages that Rust does given they are languages with memory management and other safety features built-in.
Rust has exactly the same problems with depreciation as many Frameworks rely on experimental features which are subject to change.
Edit: plus if you have ever used Rust it’s a pain to learn and use compared to C#. C# is so similar to Java and so much easier than C++ that it’s really not much of a jump for programmers new to the language.
Yea, there are 50 game engines written in rust - or so I heard.
