3 ms·

on the contrary, I find this article to be excellent. none of this stuff was ever taught to me in school, which is nuts given that the school I went to was spec

on the contrary, I find this article to be excellent. none of this stuff was ever taught to me in school, which is nuts given that the school I went to was specifically tailored toward video game development, and had[0] students create their own game engines almost entirely from scratch in C (a helper library was provided to do basic graphics things) during their second semester, and then had students create their own game engines, entirely from scratch, in C++ during their sophomore year. again: nothing like this was ever presented to us, except as some sage wisdom from upperclassmen who had figured it out on their own. you learn malloc/free when you learn C, then you learn new/delete/RAII when you learn C++, and you get a brief overview of how garbage collection broadly works in higher-level languages, and that's it, that's the education about memory management. I had never explicitly heard of the concept of a "lifetime" until Rust started gaining traction. it wasn't until working on my sophomore year game engine that an upperclassman explained the idea of building a memory-managing array-like data structure that, instead of reallocating when the capacity is reached, instead leaves the existing items where they were and allocates a new "page" of memory, so as to ensure pointers to existing items remain functional. hell, I'd never even been exposed to the idea of a per-frame "scratch" pool allocator until I saw Jon Blow talk about having such a thing as a built-in feature of his new programming language. once I saw how it worked, I was floored—it's such an easy-to-explain concept, infinitely useful, basically gives you "garbage collection for free" for any number of one-off things you need allocations for in a given frame of a video game (or other interactive application)—without the need for Actual Garbage Collection! I agree that this article is a bit lengthy, but in my opinion it does a great job of setting up the knowledge necessary to understand what it's talking about, so I'm not really sure how I'd do a better job. what in particular did you find condescending about it, especially within the first fifth of the article? --- [0] from what I've heard, this from-scratch game-engine-creation is now gone from the curriculum entirely, and now students just make shit in unreal or unity, which is tragic, imo.

sfpotter 4y ago
"Through my years in a university computer science program, this way of thinking was peddled repeatedly. Learning how to manage memory in C was an endeavor to “learn how things work”, strictly for academic purposes. The idea that anyone would ever actually do manual memory management in C these days was just unthinkable—I mean, after all, it’s current year, and everyone knows that once it’s current year, an arbitrary set of ideas that I don’t like become intrinsically false." It's impossible for me not to read this without imagining a sneering tone. And a few paragraphs later: "As you may be able to tell from my tone, I think this way of thinking is nonsensical." As for your post, it's hard for me to get worked up about whatever the game programming curriculum is these days. There are more important things in the world. Good to keep things in perspective: it's school... for game programming.
- adamrezich 4y ago
  it's hard to present contrarian ideas without coming across as overly defensive, sneering, etc., especially when the ideas are conveyed through text, and especially when you, the reader, disagree with them. the paragraph you posted is true to my experience, and true to the experience of everyone I know who's gone through CS school. > Education around memory management—as it was presented to me—was purely a historical, academic endeavor. How did the Linux kernel originally do memory management? Let’s do an assignment on that subject so you can see how gross it is! Eww, look at that malloc! Weird! Oh, don’t forget to free it! But don’t worry, kiddo; in next class, you can return to your “safe” and “managed” padded-room languages where bugs and instabilities are “impossible” (or so they claim). was your CS education appreciably different to what the author wrote above? is this not the increasingly-prevailing attitude among contemporary programmers? > As for your post, it's hard for me to get worked up about whatever the game programming curriculum is these days. There are more important things in the world. Good to keep things in perspective: it's school... for game programming. ok, should I refrain from posting unless I have something to say about world hunger or climate change or something?? hopefully you saw the point I was making which is that memory management techniques like those described in the article are pretty crucial for making high-performance real-time interactive applications, and hopefully you understand that not being taught about such things at a school whose whole point is to teach such things is pretty crazy—especially since, from the looks of things, these things aren't really being taught in school anywhere else, either! do you disagree with the author about the importance of manual memory management techniques and theory? if not, then what other point were you trying to make with that last paragraph? your reply is very confusing to me. --- EDIT: > If you slow down > Maybe because it's a relatively inconsequential topic (in the grand scheme of things) we can approach it more calmly and soberly instead of with a hyperventilating tone. > I would also say that while it can be difficult for some people to approach tendentious issues without being combative, it is indeed possible. Some might even say it's a useful skill to spend some time picking up. these are more condescending than anything in the article—projecting irrationality onto others is unbecoming. > That said, whether or not I agree with the author isn't salient it should be! discussions about programming techniques and methodologies are far more interesting and relevant than sentence after sentence explaining why you think the tone of the introduction of a lengthy article is Bad And Wrong, and, despite refusing to read the rest of said article, claiming that said article's length is also problematic.
rudedogg 4y ago
> per-frame "scratch" pool allocator Here's that Jonathan Blow stream if anyone else is curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciGQCP6HgqI&t=130s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciGQCP6HgqI&t=130s

sfpotter 4y ago

"Through my years in a university computer science program, this way of thinking was peddled repeatedly. Learning how to manage memory in C was an endeavor to “learn how things work”, strictly for academic purposes. The idea that anyone would ever actually do manual memory management in C these days was just unthinkable—I mean, after all, it’s current year, and everyone knows that once it’s current year, an arbitrary set of ideas that I don’t like become intrinsically false." It's impossible for me not to read this without imagining a sneering tone. And a few paragraphs later: "As you may be able to tell from my tone, I think this way of thinking is nonsensical." As for your post, it's hard for me to get worked up about whatever the game programming curriculum is these days. There are more important things in the world. Good to keep things in perspective: it's school... for game programming.

adamrezich 4y ago
it's hard to present contrarian ideas without coming across as overly defensive, sneering, etc., especially when the ideas are conveyed through text, and especially when you, the reader, disagree with them. the paragraph you posted is true to my experience, and true to the experience of everyone I know who's gone through CS school. > Education around memory management—as it was presented to me—was purely a historical, academic endeavor. How did the Linux kernel originally do memory management? Let’s do an assignment on that subject so you can see how gross it is! Eww, look at that malloc! Weird! Oh, don’t forget to free it! But don’t worry, kiddo; in next class, you can return to your “safe” and “managed” padded-room languages where bugs and instabilities are “impossible” (or so they claim). was your CS education appreciably different to what the author wrote above? is this not the increasingly-prevailing attitude among contemporary programmers? > As for your post, it's hard for me to get worked up about whatever the game programming curriculum is these days. There are more important things in the world. Good to keep things in perspective: it's school... for game programming. ok, should I refrain from posting unless I have something to say about world hunger or climate change or something?? hopefully you saw the point I was making which is that memory management techniques like those described in the article are pretty crucial for making high-performance real-time interactive applications, and hopefully you understand that not being taught about such things at a school whose whole point is to teach such things is pretty crazy—especially since, from the looks of things, these things aren't really being taught in school anywhere else, either! do you disagree with the author about the importance of manual memory management techniques and theory? if not, then what other point were you trying to make with that last paragraph? your reply is very confusing to me. --- EDIT: > If you slow down > Maybe because it's a relatively inconsequential topic (in the grand scheme of things) we can approach it more calmly and soberly instead of with a hyperventilating tone. > I would also say that while it can be difficult for some people to approach tendentious issues without being combative, it is indeed possible. Some might even say it's a useful skill to spend some time picking up. these are more condescending than anything in the article—projecting irrationality onto others is unbecoming. > That said, whether or not I agree with the author isn't salient it should be! discussions about programming techniques and methodologies are far more interesting and relevant than sentence after sentence explaining why you think the tone of the introduction of a lengthy article is Bad And Wrong, and, despite refusing to read the rest of said article, claiming that said article's length is also problematic.

rudedogg 4y ago

> per-frame "scratch" pool allocator Here's that Jonathan Blow stream if anyone else is curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciGQCP6HgqI&t=130s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciGQCP6HgqI&t=130s