> What you get by using Unity or Unreal Engine is that a big team already worked through all this overhead.
Obviously, given the low-level subject matter, this post wasn't aimed at turnkey engine users. In fact, people interested in this stuff are probably actively trying to be independent of those engines.
I will add that we probably need more people able to implement rendering engines. Having to chose between two corporate giants and suboptimal engines isn't ideal, neither for developers nor for players.
In the Rust graphics community, we have My First Renderer about four times, and no good renderers. It's about a year of work to get to where you can load the standard glTF examples and render them. Those are all small static scenes. Then you hit the scaling, performance, and dynamic update issues, where it gets hard.
The effort level for a good renderer in Rust is not yet known, but it's above two developer years. I'd guess three to five. Currently, there are three failed efforts and one in progress with some EU funding.
For multi-platform (desktop, laptop, browser, phone) add another year or two. All those use Vulkan, but with slightly different subsets and constraints.
It's there in the name - "Rust graphics community" as opposed to simply "the graphics community". Language fetishization above the end goal - or, rather, the language fetish is the real goal.
If you want heavy concurrency, to get some value out of all those CPUs on a desktop, you need all the help you can get from the language. Unity and Unreal pushed it through in C++, but both required huge efforts.
But it's Yet Another Reason, if you are looking to develop a game, to shitcan your dreams of writing it from scratch Jonathan Blow-style and just use one of the established engines.
Obviously, given the low-level subject matter, this post wasn't aimed at turnkey engine users. In fact, people interested in this stuff are probably actively trying to be independent of those engines.
I will add that we probably need more people able to implement rendering engines. Having to chose between two corporate giants and suboptimal engines isn't ideal, neither for developers nor for players.