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Have any multibillion dollar game (etc.) companies invested any resources into debug build modes in the open source compilers they develop with? Seems like it s

Have any multibillion dollar game (etc.) companies invested any resources into debug build modes in the open source compilers they develop with? Seems like it should be trivial to tie team productivity rates to quality of the debug experience.

fartsucker69 4y ago
That proposition seems risky. If the compiler owners don't accept your pull requests, you risk having to maintain a fork with your changes indefinitely. Also, I suspect like 95%+ of development at game dev studios happens in MSVC. Nothing to change there. Unfortunately pestering the compiler devs about this seems like the optimal approach lol
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- humanrebar 4y ago
  Maybe? If each AAA studio was putting 6-7 figures into the relevant projects, their change requests should be especially well explained and well formed. A lot of ignored PRs aren't well communicated. Also, it's kind of moot. For platforms that use GCC, Clang, etc., the maintainers are OSS communities, so that's how you influence the product in a healthy direction for your projects. To sit back and let things happen is also an option, but then debugging support might not meet your needs, for instance. Seems like mobile and wasm based platforms exist and don't generally use MSVC. Folks around here might be surprised how effective $1MM/yr in engineer salaries can be in the relatively under-resourced OSS compiler development space.
Decabytes 4y ago
Not exactly what you were asking, but RAD tried to build a debugger for Linux^1, but the project died. I’ve heard the people at RAD described as hard core old school programmers, so if they struggled with this it must just be a hard problem 1. http://www.radgametools.com/debug.htm http://www.radgametools.com/debug.htm
- bluedino 4y ago
  >> To put it bluntly, debugging on Linux is just really bad. We believe it is the biggest roadblock to great software for that platform. That article is ~10 years old, is that still true?
  - GuB-42 4y ago
    For me it is. Linux has great debugging tools, my favorite being valgrind, and I have used rr a few times, but when it comes to traditional debugging, still bad. For me, gdb is a last resort tool, and none of its frontends satisfy me (Qt Creator is the least bad I tried). I generally prefer developing on Linux, but for me, the Visual Studio (not Code) debugger is the one thing that Windows does way better.
  - mort96 4y ago
    GDB is still the king of debugging on Linux. GDB is still a really bad debugging experience. GDB front-ends are still incredibly buggy and best avoided unless you wanna debug why your debugger just broke.
cyber_kinetist 4y ago
For PS3 development it seems that the devs were forced to use a fork of GCC made to support the notorious Cell architecture (some info from here: https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/playstation-3/ https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/playstation-3/). Not sure about the NDA details but I would believe contributing to the compiler would have been difficult (and would have not really landed in the GCC trunk anyway). For PS4 and later Sony used an LLVM fork for their toolchain, so now they don't even have the obligation to share their compiler code. Maybe some improvements to LLVM will "naturally" go back to the devkit, but it's not really a good situation for open-source contribution. Not sure how it went for the XBox lineups though (Probably it used MSVC, since it's from Microsoft?). Since console development is mired up in NDAs there's not that much public info about it.
kevingadd 4y ago
If you're developing for games consoles, you're probably stuck using a specific revision of the compiler offered by the platform owner, even if it happens to be clang under the hood. In some cases their certification requirements entirely prohibit using other compilers. So improved debug performance is probably not in the cards unless you change your code to work around compiler issues.
- xgkickt 4y ago
  Possibly due to this, from what I’ve seen, compiler engineers tend to be in-house working on vendor tools, at the big engine companies, or working on script systems.
xgkickt 4y ago
For both productivity and practical reasons (the game still has to be somewhat playable), the use of pragmas to disable optimizations for the file/function of interest is generally recommended over a full debug build.
- humanrebar 4y ago
  My question was broad enough to encompass non-portable features like these. Do the games studios (etc.) contribute these features? Or is it solo enthusiasts? If relevant corps started adding the same hint flags in every toolchain, then conversations about the need for standard mechanisms might be interesting. But even if they don't get standardized, at least some common and portable fundamental libraries can support macros to smooth over the differences.

fartsucker69 4y ago

That proposition seems risky. If the compiler owners don't accept your pull requests, you risk having to maintain a fork with your changes indefinitely. Also, I suspect like 95%+ of development at game dev studios happens in MSVC. Nothing to change there. Unfortunately pestering the compiler devs about this seems like the optimal approach lol

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
humanrebar 4y ago
Maybe? If each AAA studio was putting 6-7 figures into the relevant projects, their change requests should be especially well explained and well formed. A lot of ignored PRs aren't well communicated. Also, it's kind of moot. For platforms that use GCC, Clang, etc., the maintainers are OSS communities, so that's how you influence the product in a healthy direction for your projects. To sit back and let things happen is also an option, but then debugging support might not meet your needs, for instance. Seems like mobile and wasm based platforms exist and don't generally use MSVC. Folks around here might be surprised how effective $1MM/yr in engineer salaries can be in the relatively under-resourced OSS compiler development space.

Decabytes 4y ago

Not exactly what you were asking, but RAD tried to build a debugger for Linux^1, but the project died. I’ve heard the people at RAD described as hard core old school programmers, so if they struggled with this it must just be a hard problem 1. http://www.radgametools.com/debug.htm http://www.radgametools.com/debug.htm

bluedino 4y ago
>> To put it bluntly, debugging on Linux is just really bad. We believe it is the biggest roadblock to great software for that platform. That article is ~10 years old, is that still true?
- GuB-42 4y ago
  For me it is. Linux has great debugging tools, my favorite being valgrind, and I have used rr a few times, but when it comes to traditional debugging, still bad. For me, gdb is a last resort tool, and none of its frontends satisfy me (Qt Creator is the least bad I tried). I generally prefer developing on Linux, but for me, the Visual Studio (not Code) debugger is the one thing that Windows does way better.
- mort96 4y ago
  GDB is still the king of debugging on Linux. GDB is still a really bad debugging experience. GDB front-ends are still incredibly buggy and best avoided unless you wanna debug why your debugger just broke.

cyber_kinetist 4y ago

For PS3 development it seems that the devs were forced to use a fork of GCC made to support the notorious Cell architecture (some info from here: https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/playstation-3/ https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/playstation-3/). Not sure about the NDA details but I would believe contributing to the compiler would have been difficult (and would have not really landed in the GCC trunk anyway). For PS4 and later Sony used an LLVM fork for their toolchain, so now they don't even have the obligation to share their compiler code. Maybe some improvements to LLVM will "naturally" go back to the devkit, but it's not really a good situation for open-source contribution. Not sure how it went for the XBox lineups though (Probably it used MSVC, since it's from Microsoft?). Since console development is mired up in NDAs there's not that much public info about it.

kevingadd 4y ago

If you're developing for games consoles, you're probably stuck using a specific revision of the compiler offered by the platform owner, even if it happens to be clang under the hood. In some cases their certification requirements entirely prohibit using other compilers. So improved debug performance is probably not in the cards unless you change your code to work around compiler issues.

xgkickt 4y ago
Possibly due to this, from what I’ve seen, compiler engineers tend to be in-house working on vendor tools, at the big engine companies, or working on script systems.

xgkickt 4y ago

For both productivity and practical reasons (the game still has to be somewhat playable), the use of pragmas to disable optimizations for the file/function of interest is generally recommended over a full debug build.

humanrebar 4y ago
My question was broad enough to encompass non-portable features like these. Do the games studios (etc.) contribute these features? Or is it solo enthusiasts? If relevant corps started adding the same hint flags in every toolchain, then conversations about the need for standard mechanisms might be interesting. But even if they don't get standardized, at least some common and portable fundamental libraries can support macros to smooth over the differences.