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> I can say that the Unity runtime abstracts dozens of platforms' (mac, windows, etc) various APIs, today I hear you. It's the best solution, and all credit to
by klabb3 4y ago
> I can say that the Unity runtime abstracts dozens of platforms' (mac, windows, etc) various APIs, today
I hear you. It's the best solution, and all credit to unity and others for doing that work. That said, I don't like it, because it's almost always a bad upfront tradeoff between fiedlity and velocity. Moreover you just end up with another layer in the stack, when we should have fewer. Half the time these things are broken, in my experience, not because of any fault of the middlemen, but because Microsoft, Apple or Google changed something in their proprietary, poorly documented code base.
- ncr100 4y agoI hear you right back. Absolutely true. A side note, working at Unity was fun because the point was not a generic solution for all programmers, but rather to make life easier for game developers so that they could focus on the creative aspect of their games. For example Not working around Google Play Library's latest unintentional goofiness around how their Android Activitys would close prematurely and send incomplete signals terminating their purchasing flows and then you as the game developer would have to somehow magically capture the now suddenly missing workflow signal and yada yada yada. So yes, I agree with you :-) And moving the discussion further, designing a new high level platform abstraction API could include a feature that compiles this new APIs bloat away and eliminates intermediate calls. Platform fragmentation is kind of a never going to solve it perfectly problem in my opinion. Until we have computers that write their own software to solve some end goal, humans are going to have to keep releasing patched versions of adapter layers.