Rust Is Doing for Game Engines What C Did for Operating Systems

The Hook That Hurts a Little Somewhere in a dimly lit apartment, at 2:47 a.m., a developer stares at a frozen Unity editor.
Again.

They haven’t saved in 30 minutes. Their coffee’s gone cold. The error log is just a cryptic “NullReferenceException” and something about “missing prefab.”

And that’s when they whisper the forbidden words: “Maybe I should just write my own engine.” That sentence — that desperate, caffeine-fueled delusion — used to be a death wish. 
But now?
Now it’s an origin story. Because Rust has quietly done to game engines what C once did to operating systems.
It gave developers permission to start over — this time, with sanity intact.

The Old Religion: C, C++, and the Cult of Undefined Behavior

Game engines used to be sacred monoliths — Unreal, Unity, CryEngine — each built atop a mountain of C++ and fragile dreams.

You didn’t “build” a game engine. You inherited one.
A legacy of pointer arithmetic, memory leaks, and emotional damage. C++ gave you the power to do anything. Which also meant the power to destroy everything.
At runtime.
Silently.

int* ptr = nullptr;

• ptr = 42; // the reason your studio went dark in 2014

That was the deal.
Ultimate control for ultimate chaos. And yet… that chaos built empires.
C did for operating systems what no other language could: it gave us Linux, Unix, Windows. Systems that touched everything. 
It was fast, close to the metal, and unforgiving — but it worked. Fast forward fifty years, and Rust is playing the same role.
Only this time, it’s for worlds instead of kernels.

Bevy, Fyrox, and the Rise of “We’ll Build It Ourselves” Energy

Look around: 
Bevy. Fyrox. Ambient. Veloren. Macroquad. Godot 4 with Rust bindings. These aren’t toy projects anymore — they’re playable, performant, and scarily organized. Bevy, for instance, is an ECS-first engine that makes you rethink everything you learned about game loops.
It’s data-oriented. Parallel by default. 
And the code actually reads like English.

fn move_player(mut query: Query<(&mut Transform, &Velocity)>) {

   for (mut transform, velocity) in &mut query {
       transform.translation += velocity.0;
   }

}

No inheritance. No spaghetti hierarchies.
Just systems and data, moving in perfect sync. It feels like the first time you switched from OOP to functional programming — confusing at first, then liberating.

Fyrox (formerly RG3D) takes another route — more traditional, scene-graph based, but also written entirely in Rust. It’s got an editor, physics, sound, the works.
It’s Unity without the corporate baggage or the 12GB install size. Rust didn’t just make it possible to build new engines.
It made it reasonable.

The Memory-Safety Mic Drop

Game devs are used to fear.
Fear of segfaults, fear of race conditions, fear of someone on the team “optimizing” a pointer just before launch.

Rust killed that fear. Not through garbage collection — through discipline.
Ownership. Borrowing. Lifetime checks that feel like an overprotective parent until they save your entire weekend.

When your frame drops from 120 to 30, you’ll know why.
When your AI behaves weirdly, you’ll know where. No ghost bugs. No “it works on my machine.”
Just deterministic sanity.

Sure, the compiler yells at you.
But so does your producer. At least the compiler helps you fix it. The first time you build a game engine in Rust and it runs without a crash, you’ll feel that old C-level control — minus the ulcers.

The Unreal Irony

Epic Games has an R&D branch playing with Rust right now.
Unity devs are writing plugins in Rust because they don’t trust C#.
Even Godot — the open-source darling — is flirting with Rust for performance-critical systems. And here’s the kicker: Rust doesn’t even want to replace these giants. 
It’s just making it impossible to ignore how much safer, faster, and saner the lower layers could be. It’s the same pattern that happened when C showed up in the 1970s. Before C, operating systems were written in assembly — brittle, hardware-locked, impossible to port. Then Dennis Ritchie said, “What if we just… made it portable?” 
People laughed. Then UNIX happened. Rust is doing that for engines.
Bevy isn’t Unreal yet. But neither was UNIX in ’73. And like C, Rust is proving a deeper point:
You don’t need “magic” abstractions. You need predictable power.

When ECS Becomes a Religion

Every new game engine in Rust talks about ECS (Entity Component System) like it’s the second coming. And you know what? They’re kinda right.

The old way — class hierarchies like Player -> Actor -> Entity -> Object — was elegant until it wasn’t.
Until you needed multiple inheritance.
Until “bullet” and “player” had the same physics logic but different parent classes. ECS doesn’t care. Everything’s just data. Systems just run.

fn physics(mut query: Query<(&mut Transform, &mut Velocity)>) {

   for (mut transform, velocity) in &mut query {
       transform.translation += velocity.0 * TIME_STEP;
   }

}

No spaghetti, no side effects, no “GameManager” file with 3,000 lines and 40 TODOs. Rust made ECS feel right.
Because its borrow checker enforces the same rules ECS tries to teach: no two systems mutate the same thing at once. 
It’s like the compiler and the architecture are in sync — for once. That’s the real reason Rust is special for engines.
It’s not just performance. It’s philosophy.

The Human Side: Burnout, Control, and the Dream of Ownership

Let’s be honest:
Game dev burnout isn’t about crunch. It’s about control. Spending months debugging issues in someone else’s engine. Watching your project break after a minor update. Feeling like your creativity lives in a black box owned by a corporation in San Francisco. Rust gives that control back.

You can build something from scratch — safely. You can know exactly what every byte is doing. You can fix, tweak, optimize, without begging for source access or reading decade-old C++ macros. And for indie devs, that’s oxygen.

Rust doesn’t promise fame or funding.
It just gives you tools that don’t lie. There’s something deeply personal about that.
Like hand-crafting your own world, knowing every line that runs beneath it.

Lessons Nobody Will Put in a Postmortem

• The safest code is the code you understand.
Rust forces you to understand. There’s no autopilot, and that’s a feature.
• Engines rot when they hide complexity.
The best ones — like Bevy — expose it gracefully. You see the gears turning.
• Build tools are culture.
Rust’s cargo made it normal to have first-class docs, tests, and reproducible builds. That alone changes how teams think.
• Don’t underestimate rebellion.
Every great tech shift starts with devs quietly deciding, “We can do this better.”

The Final Frame

Rust isn’t here to “kill” Unity or Unreal.
It’s doing something more profound. It’s redefining what game engine development feels like — from a herculean task reserved for billion-dollar studios to something you could, theoretically, hack on in your bedroom with lo-fi beats and a half-dead laptop.

C gave us operating systems that shaped the modern world.
Rust might give us game engines that do the same for virtual worlds. The tools are early. The docs are rough. The community’s still small.
But you can feel it. The shift. The same quiet confidence C had before it conquered the planet. Rust isn’t the next big thing. 
It’s the next long thing — the foundation for the next 30 years of how we build and play. Now if you’ll excuse me, my Bevy build just finished.
No crashes. No leaks.
And for once… no Unity splash screen.

Read the full article here: https://medium.com/@daxx5/rust-is-doing-for-game-engines-what-c-did-for-operating-systems-deb724999a13