5 ms·

Somewhat tangential to this, but I remember reading an article on HN about a group creating some web app that was constrained by some size limit (50 KB or so).

Somewhat tangential to this, but I remember reading an article on HN about a group creating some web app that was constrained by some size limit (50 KB or so). Groups ended up putting 'dead code' in their projects to guard against other groups taking their space while they were working on their feature. I think this made it so the app never got less than 50... Did you ever see something similar where devs put in some code as filler to make room for future features they were working on?

pfranz 9y ago
In my experience of vfx usually the same author has ownership over the whole tool, so there's no incentive to pad time. We have joked about adding in sleeps and removing them look impressive to users, though. Games probably have a situation more similar to what you're describing. Many games target 30fps, which is 33.3 milliseconds per frame. Each department usually gets a "budget" of how long they can spend. I've heard similar stories about padding memory usage and time, but it's hard to tell if they were serious and it's not common.
dahart 9y ago
Oh yeah, this is very common in game development, and I'm pretty sure in other embedded dev too. There's a famous story about a game programmer who saved an entire production when it started crashing something like two weeks before shipping by commenting one line of code. Turned out the line of code was a malloc (of like a megabyte) that he'd added a year earlier, in anticipation of the game running out of memory. My details are probably wrong, but I'm pretty sure I've seen this story linked on HN. I was in game dev for a decade, and I saw this happen where I worked, the studio technical director adopted the practice of saving some space, because we always started running out of memory near the deadline as artists threw in all their content. *edit: http://www.dodgycoder.net/2012/02/coding-tricks-of-game-developers.html http://www.dodgycoder.net/2012/02/coding-tricks-of-game-deve...
digikata 9y ago
It's typical in mil & aviation software to get specs with a required 50% cpu & memory reserve in anticipation of updates in the maintenance window (which could be shown as decades for many products).

pfranz 9y ago

In my experience of vfx usually the same author has ownership over the whole tool, so there's no incentive to pad time. We have joked about adding in sleeps and removing them look impressive to users, though. Games probably have a situation more similar to what you're describing. Many games target 30fps, which is 33.3 milliseconds per frame. Each department usually gets a "budget" of how long they can spend. I've heard similar stories about padding memory usage and time, but it's hard to tell if they were serious and it's not common.

dahart 9y ago

Oh yeah, this is very common in game development, and I'm pretty sure in other embedded dev too. There's a famous story about a game programmer who saved an entire production when it started crashing something like two weeks before shipping by commenting one line of code. Turned out the line of code was a malloc (of like a megabyte) that he'd added a year earlier, in anticipation of the game running out of memory. My details are probably wrong, but I'm pretty sure I've seen this story linked on HN. I was in game dev for a decade, and I saw this happen where I worked, the studio technical director adopted the practice of saving some space, because we always started running out of memory near the deadline as artists threw in all their content. *edit: http://www.dodgycoder.net/2012/02/coding-tricks-of-game-developers.html http://www.dodgycoder.net/2012/02/coding-tricks-of-game-deve...

digikata 9y ago

It's typical in mil & aviation software to get specs with a required 50% cpu & memory reserve in anticipation of updates in the maintenance window (which could be shown as decades for many products).