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Exactly this. The speaker's claim to fame is building a game from scratch. He relies on (based on his episode guide titles) Windows, C++, DirectSound, OpenGL, j
by kortex 7y ago
Exactly this. The speaker's claim to fame is building a game from scratch. He relies on (based on his episode guide titles) Windows, C++, DirectSound, OpenGL, just to name a few, not to mention human interface devices, to achieve this in a remotely reasonable timeframe.
Yes, he's got a point about over-relying on layers of abstraction, but that abstraction was written with untold millions of dev-hours across thousands of organizational structures and independent individuals. The only way to get pieces of such disparate pedigree to operate together is abstraction and APIs. You have to bottleneck and standardize complexity to logical boundaries or else everyone ends up rewriting their OS to ship with their game. A standardized ISA wouldn't fix this because you still need standardized OS ABIs, hardware wire protocols, network protocols, media write protocols.
His argument boils down to "get all engineers to agree upon an ISA, OS, SoC, hardware interface". As a start, he suggests "Simplify the NIC, SATA, USB and video interface". Yeah, ok, I'll believe that can happen when engineers agree upon bike shed colors reliably.
When you're basically the only person in the stack, it's easy to naively say "just standardize everything!" but as anyone who has been to any organizational meetings knows, getting humans to agree on ANYTHING is an involved process.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago> The speaker's claim to fame is building a game from scratch. Handmade Hero may be what he's known for in the general population, but Casey Muratori has been in game development since games were written directly to ABIs. He worked on WinG, he worked at RAD Game Tools, he's probably got code in more computer games than you can even name. In other words, he has a pretty damned good idea what he's saying.
- zamalek 7y agoBeing famous and having credible experience does not automatically make you correct on all matters.
- detaro 7y agoNobody is claiming that.
- zamalek 7y agoYou're right. No claim was made that he was correct on all matters. However, that comment provided no substance beyond a list of credentials. The claim is that he is an expert on all matters related to programming; none of those credentials have anything to do with OS, ISA, or hardware development. Certainly a claim that he is more of an expert than anyone here, which is absurd because HN does not consist of a uniform sample of human beings. Much less uniform in the comments section. People who care to comment on posts like this are passionate about what they do; meaning that they are most-likely very good at it. He might be able to design the best computer system for a narrow scope - which has already happened in some respects: we have Vulkan, which he very curiously avoids, instead opting for the heavily abstracted OpenGL. His opinions are valuable and worth listening to. Others' opinions are not worthless merely because of his CV and social network status.
- detaro 7y agoThe comment it responded to can be read as trying to use credentials/his "claim to fame" to discredit the argument as being from someone who didn't understand what they are building on - additional credentials that this person might know what they are talking about seem like substance to me.
- zamalek 7y agoOnce again, you're right.