What I have experienced is that C++ classes with inheritance are good at modeling objects in a game at first, when you are just starting and the hierarchy is super simple. Afterwards, it isn’t a good match. To can try to hack around this in several ways, but the short version of it is that if your game isn’t very simple you are better off starting with an Entity Component System setup. It will be more cumbersome to use than the language-provided features at first, but the lines cross very quickly.
Those data scientists at least from my experience are more into math/business than interested in most efficient programming.
Or at least that was the situation at first and it sticked.
So there’s really three forces at play in making C++ the standard:
1) The Microsoft ecosystem. They literally stopped supporting C by not adopting the C99 standard in their compiler. If you wanted any modern convenience, you had to compile in C++ mode. New APIs like Direct3D were theoretically accessible from C (via COM) but in practice designed for C++.
2) Better compilers and more CPU cycles to spare. You could actually count on the compiler to do the right thing often enough.
3) Seamless gradual adoption for C developers.
Rust has a good compiler, but it lacks that big ticket ecosystem push and is not entirely trivial for C++ developers to adopt.
The bigger problem is just inertia: large game engines are enormous.
Was trying to use it with some kind of gcc for windows. The C++ part was still lacking some required features, so it was advised to use D3D from C instead C++. There were some helper macros, but overall I was glad when Microsoft started to release their Express (and later Community) Editions of Visual Studio.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/c11-and-c17-standard-...
Perhaps the speed-up you remember had something to do with the switch-over from 16 bits to 32, which would have been the early to mid 90s. Or you're thinking of Microsoft's C compiler starting from Lattice C, back in the 80s before my time. There was also a lot of work done on pre-compiled headers to speed compilation in the latter half of the 90s (including some that I was responsible for).
At best rust fixes crash bugs and not the usual logic and rendering bugs that are far more involved and plague users more often.
Of course, you can do job queuing systems in C++ too. But Rust naturally pushes you toward the more parallel path with all your logic. In C++ the temptation is to start sequential to avoid data races; in systems like Bevy, you start parallel to begin with.
