Zero one infinity rule
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Zero one infinity rule
1–10 of 149 posts
Re: Zero one infinity rule
#2Am I the only person who sometimes makes an exception for "two" ?
Re: Zero one infinity rule
#3John Carmack argued the opposite. He said he would hardcore limits into his data structures. Limits that would never be hit under normal operating circumstances. He argued that when you design software you should have an idea under what circumstances it will run and optimize for those. The fact that people normally don't do this, is why software often lags - that algo you implemented worked worked just fine when it's hashmap has 1000 keys, but not when it has 1m keys.
I haven't articulated his point very well, but I lost interest in this comment mid way thru.
Re: Zero one infinity rule
#4Am I the only person who sometimes makes an exception for "two" ?
No.
But I have the decency to feel bad and leave an apologetic comment.
Re: Zero one infinity rule
#5John Carmack argued the opposite. He said he would hardcore limits into his data structures. Limits that would never be hit under normal operating circumstances. He argued that when you design software you should have an idea under what circumstances it will run and optimize for those. The fact that people normally don't do this, is why software often lags - that algo you implemented worked worked just fine when it's…
You can see this kind of design in action in the Source engine, perhaps inherited from Quake (which is partly Carmack's work of course). There are hard limits on things like how many objects can exist at once. Occasionally those get hit… usually due to a memory leak![0] So the artificial limit helps find real problems. That's also been my experience with PHP, which limits the amount of memory a request or script execution can consume by default.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pw2X1yhrDdE — check out shounic's other videos too, there's lots of interesting content there about how complex game systems fail, including about these limits
Re: Zero one infinity rule
#6John Carmack argued the opposite. He said he would hardcore limits into his data structures. Limits that would never be hit under normal operating circumstances. He argued that when you design software you should have an idea under what circumstances it will run and optimize for those. The fact that people normally don't do this, is why software often lags - that algo you implemented worked worked just fine when it's…
Ive come to agree with this. Say you have a struct that contains a name. If you limit the name size to say 64 bytes, then you can store it in the struct, otherwise you need to have a separate allocation and an indirection. This makes the code slower, more error prone and more complex to use. So think hard of when “infinite” is justified.
Re: Zero one infinity rule
#7John Carmack argued the opposite. He said he would hardcore limits into his data structures. Limits that would never be hit under normal operating circumstances. He argued that when you design software you should have an idea under what circumstances it will run and optimize for those. The fact that people normally don't do this, is why software often lags - that algo you implemented worked worked just fine when it's…
Sure if you know the operating domain, just hard code some sensible upper limit and move on. Not that this way is "better" in all cases. YAGNI and all that
Re: Zero one infinity rule
#8John Carmack argued the opposite. He said he would hardcore limits into his data structures. Limits that would never be hit under normal operating circumstances. He argued that when you design software you should have an idea under what circumstances it will run and optimize for those. The fact that people normally don't do this, is why software often lags - that algo you implemented worked worked just fine when it's…
You can still have both: an algorithm that technically has no formal numerical limit, but have warnings or errors when it reaches some condition that is clearly outside the design scope.
For example, you might have a system that warns somehow if you start inserting items at the front of a vector with over a million items (when you originally expected the vector to be used for tens of items). If the structure is suddenly being used for something way outside of it's design scope, it's probably in need of a re-think.
Re: Zero one infinity rule
#9I learned this rule through, of all things, the children's series Animorphs. One book they encounter a colony of ants, who mention that "You are one, we are many" and count that way; any finite number is one, and infinite numbers are many.
Re: Zero one infinity rule
#10Am I the only person who sometimes makes an exception for "two" ?
A ping-pong buffer certainly seems like generalising to a ping-pong-pang-peng-pung-p(infinity)ng buffer would be overkill.