5 ms·

RAD's Charles Bloom has a blog (https://cbloomrants.blogspot.com https://cbloomrants.blogspot.com) which is excellent for anyone interested in high-performance

RAD's Charles Bloom has a blog (https://cbloomrants.blogspot.com https://cbloomrants.blogspot.com) which is excellent for anyone interested in high-performance programming. Especially compression.

jo032 6y ago
fabien giesen, also at RAD, has a very informative blog as well. https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/ https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/ they have a seriously impressive group of developers
- person_of_color 6y ago
  What were they paying to keep these greybeards around?
  - Rexxar 6y ago
    Interesting job with other people they like is probably a good guess.
  - psykotic 6y ago
    RAD always paid very well by gamedev standards. But that was never the main reason people worked there. Some of the engineers are older but Fabian is in his thirties and last I checked his goatee wasn't greying.
  - killtimeatwork 6y ago
    AFAIR a public H1B entry from mid-2000 shows $300k salary, which was impressive at the time even for non-gamedev.
    - person_of_color 6y ago
      Thats insane for wages.
  - JabavuAdams 6y ago
    Work environment matters more than pay, and the pay presumably was very good. Imagine being down the hall from the people who literally started indie game development, or demo-scene royalty.
caeril 6y ago
Everyone who works there is extremely talented. Fabien, Sean, Allen, etc. Jeff has a very keen eye for it. He's funny, too. Highly recommend The Jeff and Casey Show for podcast content.
mrec 6y ago
Not just high-performance, his "Library Writing Realizations" post is also well worth a read whatever domain you're working in. http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2015/09/library-writing-realizations.html http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2015/09/library-writing-real...
duskwuff 6y ago
Especially compression. The compression provided by RAD Tools is nothing short of otherworldly -- it can provide compression ratios comparable to XZ, but with decompression speeds more along the lines of what you'd expect from gzip (or even better). I hope that Epic does something interesting with what RAD has built here. Taking it more proprietary (e.g, halting new licensing) would be a huge blow for the industry.
- glandium 6y ago
  How does it compare with zstandard these days?
  - jacobolus 6y ago
    Cbloom has a bunch of blog posts with charts purporting to show it doing significantly faster decoding than zstd at every choice of compression ratio. I would trust him to run his own benchmarks fairly and properly, but I am not sure if there have been good independent benchmarks done.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]

RAD's Charles Bloom has a blog (https://cbloomrants.blogspot.com https://cbloomrants.blogspot.com) which is excellent for anyone interested in high-performance programming. Especially compression.

jo032 6y ago

fabien giesen, also at RAD, has a very informative blog as well. https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/ https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/ they have a seriously impressive group of developers

person_of_color 6y ago
What were they paying to keep these greybeards around?
- Rexxar 6y ago
  Interesting job with other people they like is probably a good guess.
- psykotic 6y ago
  RAD always paid very well by gamedev standards. But that was never the main reason people worked there. Some of the engineers are older but Fabian is in his thirties and last I checked his goatee wasn't greying.
- killtimeatwork 6y ago
  AFAIR a public H1B entry from mid-2000 shows $300k salary, which was impressive at the time even for non-gamedev.
  - person_of_color 6y ago
    Thats insane for wages.
- JabavuAdams 6y ago
  Work environment matters more than pay, and the pay presumably was very good. Imagine being down the hall from the people who literally started indie game development, or demo-scene royalty.

caeril 6y ago

Everyone who works there is extremely talented. Fabien, Sean, Allen, etc. Jeff has a very keen eye for it. He's funny, too. Highly recommend The Jeff and Casey Show for podcast content.

mrec 6y ago

Not just high-performance, his "Library Writing Realizations" post is also well worth a read whatever domain you're working in. http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2015/09/library-writing-realizations.html http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2015/09/library-writing-real...

duskwuff 6y ago

Especially compression. The compression provided by RAD Tools is nothing short of otherworldly -- it can provide compression ratios comparable to XZ, but with decompression speeds more along the lines of what you'd expect from gzip (or even better). I hope that Epic does something interesting with what RAD has built here. Taking it more proprietary (e.g, halting new licensing) would be a huge blow for the industry.

glandium 6y ago
How does it compare with zstandard these days?
- jacobolus 6y ago
  Cbloom has a bunch of blog posts with charts purporting to show it doing significantly faster decoding than zstd at every choice of compression ratio. I would trust him to run his own benchmarks fairly and properly, but I am not sure if there have been good independent benchmarks done.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]