vvanders

13 ms·

61.
by vvanders 3y ago
The fact that Rust also has a pretty-print("{:#}")[1] a single character away is also really convenient. When you're working with JSON or debug printing types it's nice to be able to format that without reaching for exte
62.
by vvanders 3y ago
That's highly dependent on access patterns and domain space. When I was optimizing for render sorting on mobile hardware we knew we would never see 2k+ drawcalls and cache aware tuning gave us huge end-user facing benefits.
63.
by vvanders 3y ago
I hope Godot/Bevy do well but there's a kernel of truth there as well. It was not uncommon for us to make significant changes to licensed engines to meet the needs of the game style/design. UE3 for instance was pretty awful
64.
by vvanders 3y ago
IMO it doesn't really matter if they do a 180, they've telegraphed the direction they want to go. If I had a dependency on Unity I'd be evaluating my options pretty seriously to migrate off of the engine. Hopefully it spurs f
65.
by vvanders 3y ago
They're still incredibly dangerous. Even with all the safety guards you've got 50-300hp being directed to a free-space shaft. When we got a mower we went with a flail mower because we'd be mowing near neighbors and a bush h
66.
by vvanders 3y ago
It's such a sad state of things, really where ham radio should be going but instead it feels like things just get stuck in the past(unless you're talking FT-8 but even that is less about experimentation and more just another mod
67.
by vvanders 3y ago
It's funny, I spent a good long while in gamedev with various visual tools(UE3 Kismet[1], node/UI editors in Maya/MAX, etc). The parallels between PLC workflow and those are uncanny. Might be one of the few industries where I
68.
by vvanders 3y ago
If you're going to be installing anything in adverse environments or for any period of time PLCs are the go-to for a lot of one-off solutions. Some of them get pretty spendy quickly but Automation Direct has some reasonable($100-200) P
69.
by vvanders 3y ago
+1 on ditching PowerLine, they've been shown to exceed local RFI limits by turning all your house wires into a giant radiating antenna[1] but somehow they haven't pulled them from the market. The cynic in me says this is because i
70.
by vvanders 3y ago
The ISM bands are much, much more limited in other countries(eg duty cycle). I agree that really interesting stuff is happening in ISM space however reallocating ham allocations doesn't seem like the right path forward. FWIW I think re
71.
by vvanders 3y ago
A good counter to this is having a strong technical IC leadership roles(I.E. Staff IC or similar) that leadership regularly gets input on in terms what is impactful in areas like this. The key piece is the work is low-visibility when succes
72.
by vvanders 3y ago
Seeed and RAK make modules that are ~$20 and work over AT commands, however you still need to abide by ISM bands(or relevant band plan for the country you are in) which can limit your duty cycles.
73.
by vvanders 3y ago
The fact that spreading factors are orthogonal as well is also pretty impressive. In the ham space other than FT-8 you don't really see a whole lot of interesting modulation techniques like you do with LoRa. The fact that it works over
74.
by vvanders 3y ago
I don't think anyone is suggesting shared_ptr explicitly, more that if you're coming from Python/Java/etc it's a similar to a GC memory model and a bit more familiar if that's where your experience is. I'v
75.
by vvanders 3y ago
I've seen so may flat profiles due to shared_ptr. Rust has done a lot of things right but one thing it really did well was putting a decent amount of friction into std::sync::Arc<T>(and offering std::rc::Rc<T> when you don&
76.
by vvanders 3y ago
Those disjoint memory addresses can be an absolute pain to deal with, ask anyone who had to spend time dragging performance out of the PS3 despite it being faster on paper. UMA/USM can also bring it's own set of issues when you ha
77.
by vvanders 3y ago
There are always exceptions, programming for the PS3 was... interesting given the SPUs didn't have any caches, although one could argue they were closer to DSPs with the manual DMA required. I'm not really interested in arguing se
78.
by vvanders 3y ago
If you don't understand C, C++, or one could argue Rust these days you're sitting at an abstraction level much higher than where the "systems" domain tends to be. ABI, cache misses, page tables and memory mapping, restri
79.
by vvanders 3y ago
Degrees are useful but there's a whole class of things they skip over as well. When I was going to college the state college didn't teach C on a regular basis and we usually had a number of people at my community college since the
80.
by vvanders 3y ago
Still didn't prevent us from taking a wide berth around the idea when I was working on my first title in the industry. The studio was aware of the patent and wasn't willing to take on any risk.
81.
by vvanders 3y ago
Having seen a number of footguns with references and lambda captures as well where the compiler won't warn/catch I don't think it's unique to coroutines. We were using coroutines about ~12 years ago in embedded contexts,
82.
by vvanders 3y ago
> A very real aspect is credits. If you're developing some SaaS product or whatever, you stay a nameless cog in the wheel, and in the worst case your entire work was for nothing because the company goes down in flames anyway. That
83.
by vvanders 3y ago
I've not been in that industry but was for a while, the closest input metric I ever saw that correlated to success was how fast your tools let you iterate on ideas to find the core of what was "fun" and the polish it until it
84.
by vvanders 3y ago
I've had to deal with fragmentation at some point or another across most titles I've shipped or larger programs. Small allocations are actually worse in some ways because they incur a lot of fine-grained fragmentation. My favorite
85.
by vvanders 3y ago
If you don't care about heap allocations then why are you using C++ :)
86.
by vvanders 3y ago
Heap fragmentation is another, pimpl works but it's really papering over limitations in the pre-processor and header model that leaks details to downstream consumers.
87.
by vvanders 3y ago
That gives me serious collada vibes. I've been out of the space for ~6 years but I recall that collada was the thing that was supposed to solve all of this, looks like it didn't really take off.
88.
by vvanders 3y ago
Flash wear says hello.
89.
by vvanders 3y ago
That's good to hear, I've used that in the past to drive down codesize even on non embedded targets by compiling for size and rebuilding the stdlib.
90.
by vvanders 3y ago
Pretty decent overview and lots of solid advice, on this point: > So why should you, as a seasoned software developer, become a mentor? Early in my career I got some very good advice and mentorship from a number of people that I respect

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