Hey @Raf !
I love Julia syntax-wise. To be honest, I haven’t had too many, if any, issue with the GC yet. But I don’t think I’m at the point with the projects I’ve been creating for that to matter yet. I also haven’t dug too deep into performance yet to understand any bottlenecks I have. The main focus is to get it working right now, and then go back and find performance gains. As I’m not really creating something conventional by Julia standards, I’m sure there’s a lot of improvements I’ll be able to make to my code with very little effort.
As for other things, I think the hardest part of this is understanding Julia documentation, and finding code examples for when I get stuck. Dealing with the package ecosystem has been a struggle at times. Finding packages that are actually maintained (especially for game dev), have good documentation/examples, and that have the full functionality of their c/c++ counterparts (when they are bindings) feels next to impossible. But overall, I’ve been able to work past a lot of that.
Another thing is binaries. Obviously for games, I want to be able to run it on other people’s machines. I’ve been using PackageCompiler.jl, which has been great overall, but the binary size is pretty big for the size of the game I’m creating. Also, dealing with file paths with the builds on different machines was a nightmare, and still quite isn’t where I want it. Also, the builds take 10+ minutes on my main machine (i9-12900k), so any mistakes I make are pretty costly when I need to recompile my projects.
However, overall I am very satisfied with using Julia for game dev. I’m hoping I can make a solid 2d engine that people can use to learn Julia and how to make games fairly easily. It’s going to be quite a while until I get there, but hopefully next year I can build some momentum, and get some external contributors to the project.