I want to make a small procedurally generated game. An engine such as Godot, Unity, or Unreal is overkill for the project. I began to make the game using Godot with C# and found myself not enjoying the inherently OOP programming style and ultimately not using the editor much at all.
Rust
High performance and memory safety is important to me, so I naturally gravitated towards Rust. The two graphics library options seem to boil down to WGPU and various bindings like SDL3 via sdl3-sys. My issue is that I am spending more time making a wrapper and worrying about if I am managing C stuff and lifetimes than making the engine. Additionally, almost all of this wrapping code requires unsafe blocks which feels counterintuitive. I understand the mentality is to isolate and abstract the unsafe parts first so later the engine/ game code becomes purely safe Rust, but I have a lot of engine code ahead yet. Rust is also extremely verbose and difficult to work in when wrapping C libraries. This could simply be due to my lack of Rust experience.
WGPU seems great, but it doesn't seem as portable as C/C++ with SDL3. I would also need a multitude of other libraries to cover window management, audio, etc. Compile times are also slow, especially with extra large libraries. I know this from using bevy, which even with dynamic compiling (I can't remember exactly what it is called), it still left much to be desired. I know people say C++ can be slow, but I managed to get my entire, albeit small engine (~3000 LOC) that used SDL3, GLM, and a JSON library compiling in under ~1.7 seconds.
C++
Should I move back to plain C++ and SDL3-GPU? I moved away originally because I became increasingly worried about memory safety, overall language bloat, and due to readings like: https://blog.habets.se/2026/05/Everything-in-C-is-undefined-behavior.html. This article explains that even "correct" C/C++ code contains UB, possibly application or game breaking. Is this an overreaction for game development specifically?
C#
C# is an option, but I think I would have to write it in an unusual manner to avoid GC allocations/ stutters within core engine hot paths. I have also heard it can be a nightmare to port to other platforms, but that could be outdated information. I think Unity created an entire compiler for it to translate C# to C++ for that exact issue.
I know this is a long post, but I would appreciate any input from anyone with more experience. What language would be best? Should I ditch porting capabilities for Rust, a little performance for C#, safety for C++, or something else entirely?
