4 ms·

If this person was taught game dev any time before about 2005, that would have still been relevant knowledge. Doing a large malloc or causing paging could have

If this person was taught game dev any time before about 2005, that would have still been relevant knowledge. Doing a large malloc or causing paging could have slaughtered game execution, especially during streaming. >If you want a good malloc impl just use tcmalloc or jemalloc and be done with it This wasn't applicable until relatively recently.

jcelerier 4y ago
> Doing a large malloc or causing paging could have slaughtered game execution, especially during streaming. ... it still does ? I had a case a year or so ago (on then-latest Linux / GCC / etc.) where a very sporadic allocation of 40-something bytes (very exactly, inserting a couple of int64 in an unordered_map at the wrong time) in a real-time thread was enough to go from "ok" to "unuseable"
- charles_kaw 4y ago
  i suppose so. modern engines generally have a memory handler, which means that mallocs are usually coached in some type of asset management. you are also discouraged from extending working memory of the scene suddenly. When I was doing gamedev, even then, there was no reason to big malloc because everything was already done for you with good guardrails
  - jcelerier 4y ago
    I mean, if it's a custom memory handler, pool allocator, etc. it's not what people generally mean by malloc, which is the call to the libc function
syntheweave 4y ago
If you go way back into the archives of the blog's author, probably about ten years now, you will find another memory-related rant on how multisampled VST instrument plugins should be simple and "just" need mmap. I did, in fact, call him out on that. I did not know exactly how those plugins worked then(though I have a much better idea now) but I already knew that it couldn't be so easy. The actual VST devs I shared it with concurred. But it looks like he's simply learned more ways of blaming his tools since then.

jcelerier 4y ago

> Doing a large malloc or causing paging could have slaughtered game execution, especially during streaming. ... it still does ? I had a case a year or so ago (on then-latest Linux / GCC / etc.) where a very sporadic allocation of 40-something bytes (very exactly, inserting a couple of int64 in an unordered_map at the wrong time) in a real-time thread was enough to go from "ok" to "unuseable"

charles_kaw 4y ago
i suppose so. modern engines generally have a memory handler, which means that mallocs are usually coached in some type of asset management. you are also discouraged from extending working memory of the scene suddenly. When I was doing gamedev, even then, there was no reason to big malloc because everything was already done for you with good guardrails
- jcelerier 4y ago
  I mean, if it's a custom memory handler, pool allocator, etc. it's not what people generally mean by malloc, which is the call to the libc function

syntheweave 4y ago

If you go way back into the archives of the blog's author, probably about ten years now, you will find another memory-related rant on how multisampled VST instrument plugins should be simple and "just" need mmap. I did, in fact, call him out on that. I did not know exactly how those plugins worked then(though I have a much better idea now) but I already knew that it couldn't be so easy. The actual VST devs I shared it with concurred. But it looks like he's simply learned more ways of blaming his tools since then.