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It takes a PhD to develop that

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Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#231

Post by cat199 »

lbayes wrote: post #196
TeMPOraL wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconding. It takes doing some low-level gamedev[0] stuff, or using software written by people like Casey, to realize just how fast software can be. There's an art to it, and it hits diminishing returns with complex software, but the baseline of popular software is so low it doesn't take much more than a pinch of care to beat it by an order of magnitude. (Cue in the "but why bother, my app is IO bound anyway" counter…

I feel obliged to point out the destructive power of Knuth's statement, "Premature optimization is the root of all evil." I have encountered far too many people who interpret that to mean, "thou shall not even even consider performance until a user, PM or executive complains about it."

... the best usage of this phrase i've encountered is using it to shut down a requirements discussion

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#232

Post by Agentlien »

mwcampbell wrote: post #56
tinco wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the experienced developer is Casey Muratori who is somewhat well known for being a very experienced developer. That makes it less likely that he doesn't know what he's talking about and is skipping over hard/slow features.

However, his experience, in games and game development tools AFAIK, might not be fully applicable to the development of mainstream commercial software that has to try to be all things to all people, including considerations like internationalization, accessibility, and backward compatibility. The performance difference that he demonstrated between Windows Terminal and refterm is certainly dramatic, but I wouldn't be…

Internationalization and accessibility are very important in game development. A lot of time is invested in this and larger studios have dedicated UI/UX teams which spend a lot of time on these issues.

The same is true of backwards compatibilty. As an example, making sure old save data is compatible with new versions is an important consideration.

Source: I'm a game programmer working mainly with graphics and performance, but I previously spent five years working on the UI team at a AAA studio.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#233

Post by maficious »

avereveard wrote: post #210
maficious wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "font some random HN commenter happened to use" is some f****** proportional Calibri. I want to see someone use it in any terminal emulator. Refterm defaults to Cascadia Code, but, fair enough, it doesn't have fallback yet. Its' description says also: "Reference monospace terminal renderer". "monospace" is there for a reason. It's worth mentioning though, that Windows Terminal also defaults to Cascadia Code and C…

> some f*** proportional Calibri Refterm defaults to Cascadia Code cascadia is as borken as the other font, so what now? https://i.imgur.com/WeV8Ror.png maybe writing a unicode rendering isn't that easy? maybe drop the attitude?

>maybe drop the attitude?

You came here with an attitude.

> I just launched "dir" https://i.imgur.com/lkbOR3i.png can't even print properly the decimal separator. maybe it wasn't that easy.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#234

Post by choeger »

csande17 wrote: post #42
choeger wrote: post #10

Counter argument: If the experienced programmers stay where they are, software development will forever remain craftsmanship. A single developer can only tutor so many juniors. In fact, I think that teaching and encouraging to learn is the most important thing in SE. And that has to begin with leadership figures that don't believe their own knowledge gets obsolete after one year just because the latest framework got…

> SE should not be an art form. It should be founded in solid science and abstraction should allow us to keep our knowledge applicable. Software engineering can never be anything but an art form! A lot of fields of endeavor have both mechanical "science-based" components and creative "art form" ones. An inexperienced chef can get some productive cooking done by mechanically following the steps of a recipe someone els…

I get this sentiment often, but I think it is incorrect. Software developers should not consider themselves artists - they should consider themselves designers. Yes, a designer has some freedom to express themselves, but mostly they should satisfy the customer. Think of someone designing a lamp for IKEA. The functional and nonfunctional constraints outweigh the artistic freedom by far. Software developers have one advantage over the poor soul that has to come up with that lamp, though: For us there is serious, hard, science that tells us what can and what cannot work. The IKEA designer must rely on market research.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#235

Post by 9935c101ab17a66 »

onion2k wrote: post #182
vermilingua wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is some schoolyard level stuff right here. The GP isn't using a monospaced font. Who, in the history of terminal emulators, has wanted to use a non-monospaced font in their terminal?

This is exactly the sort of "we can just skip that feature to make it faster!" edge case that I was talking about in my post.

Wait, what? Your edge case is something that no one would ever (should ever?) do? Are you going to complain about it not rendering scripts fonts correctly either?

Also, it's worth noting that this isn't a compelling argument in the first place because the windows terminal doesn't even come close to rendering readable Arabic, it fucks up emoji rendering, etc – all cases that Casey was able to basically solve after two weekends of working on this.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#236

Post by StillBored »

christophilus wrote: post #157
cornel_io wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like you've never seen performance of a heavily worked-on subsystem increase by 10x because one guy who was good at that kind of stuff spent a day or two focused on the problem. I've seen that happen at least 10 times over my career, including at very big companies with very bright people writing the code. I've been that guy. There are always these sorts of opportunities in all but the most heavily optimi…

I’ve seen it at least as many times, too. Most of the time, the optimization is pretty obvious. Adding an index to a query, or using basic dynamic programming techniques, or changing data structures to optimize a loop’s lookups. I can’t think of a counter example, actually (where a brutally slow system I was working on wasn’t fairly easily optimized into adequate performance).

Yah, was going to say something like this. I've fixed these problems a few times, and I don't really think any of them were particularly hard. That is because if your the first person to look at something with an eye to performance there is almost always some low hanging fruit that will gain a lot of perf. Being the 10th person to look at it, or attack something that is widely viewed as algorithmically at its limit OTOH is a different problem.

I'm not even sure it takes an "experienced" engineer, one of my first linux patches was simply to remove a goto, which dropped an exponential factor from something, and changed it from "slow" to imperceptible.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#237

Post by maficious »

avereveard wrote: post #104
jiggawatts wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This particular case was discussed at length on Reddit and on YC News. The general consensus was that the Microsoft developers simply didn't have performance in the vocabulary, and couldn't fathom it being a solvable problem despite having a trivial scenario on their hands with no complexity to it at all. The "complaining developer" produced a proof of concept in just two weekends that notably had more features[1] an…

I just launched "dir" https://i.imgur.com/lkbOR3i.png can't even print properly the decimal separator. maybe it wasn't that easy.

Now what? What now? How about now? Just built it from source.

https://imgur.com/dGI5W2S

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#238

Post by maficious »

avereveard wrote: post #214
mwcampbell wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect an i18n issue. What locale are you using, and what is the decimal separator character supposed to be in your locale?

https://i.imgur.com/WrsVwFz.png absolutely standard

well, whatever is different in your settings, mine renders normal https://imgur.com/dGI5W2S

EDIT: I am sorry for the attitude, changed "wrong" to "different"

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#239

Post by aahortwwy »

dr_hooo wrote: post #131
moralestapia wrote: post #8

This reflects a lot of what goes on in Academia as well. Also, if you think you can counter a "that's not possible" with a working proof of said thing working, think again, most people don't like to be shown they're wrong, particularly tenured professors. That's one of the fastest ways to sabotage your own developing career. "Yes men" climb the ladder much easier, but then work doesn't do itself so that's the catch.…

I would really be surprised if any tenured professor would shut down a solution to a well known hard problem just based on his ego. More likely the solution is not as well presented, researched or thought through as it seems (I'm assuming we're not talking about astrophysics here).

> I would really be surprised

I wouldn't.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#240

Post by Agentlien »

AndrewThrowaway wrote: post #86
meheleventyone wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty straightforward case of prioritization. There are always more things to do on a game project than you have people and time to do. The game runs well enough so the people who could optimize things by rewriting them from CPU to GPU are doing other things instead. Later performance is a noticeable problem to the dev team, from customer feedback and need to ship in more resource constrained environments (VR a…

Makes sense and then it kinda agrees with parent comment that "Microsoft developers simply didn't have performance in the vocabulary". Yes, there is no doubt that "there are always more things to do on a game project than you have people and time to do". However how there is time to firstly make "main thread on single core" monster and then redo it according to game development 101 - make use of GPU. It is no joke -…

I work within game development. Mainly on graphics programming and performance. There's always a number of things I know would speed various systems up but that I don't have time to implement because there are so many bigger fires to put out.

Also, I have rewritten CPU implementations to run on the GPU before and it's often nontrivial. Sometimes even in seemingly straightforward cases. The architectures are very different, you only gain speed if you can properly parallelize the computations, and a lot of things which are trivial on the CPU becomes a real hassle on the GPU.

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