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Let's compile Quake like it's 1997

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Re: Let's compile Quake like it's 1997

#31

Post by bityard »

eurekin wrote: post #29
kristopolous wrote: post #3

"VC++6 is remarkably powerful for 1996. It has features such as "Go to definition", breakpoints, stacktrace, and variable inspections (but no Intellisense auto-completion yet). I never used it but it must have felt like a dream at the time." And here we are, in a generation of people writing blogs that never used VS6. I am now officially old. I was still using VS6 as late as 2009 btw...also it's from 1998. If you mad…

It feels now like an alternative timeline, one which performance optimisations were first and foremost still. Sometimes I fantasize, thinking how would our current development ecosystem look like, if we never abandoned the "be very vigilant with all resources you use" approach, that includes the whole webdev liftoff, where we ship a few hundred mb chromium engine for a dock app

In the timeline I remember, Microsoft and Windows were routinely criticized for producing bloated and buggy systems. Especially from those who previously used an Amiga or Mac. A new version of Windows inevitably meant buying a whole new computer, along with upgrading the memory midway through it's 3-4 year lifespan.

Re: Let's compile Quake like it's 1997

#33

Post by Uvix »

kristopolous wrote: post #3

"VC++6 is remarkably powerful for 1996. It has features such as "Go to definition", breakpoints, stacktrace, and variable inspections (but no Intellisense auto-completion yet). I never used it but it must have felt like a dream at the time." And here we are, in a generation of people writing blogs that never used VS6. I am now officially old. I was still using VS6 as late as 2009 btw...also it's from 1998. If you mad…

Could be worse. It’s finally gone now but I believe that my employer used VS6 as late as 2025.

Re: Let's compile Quake like it's 1997

#34

Post by miki123211 »

eurekin wrote: post #29
kristopolous wrote: post #3

"VC++6 is remarkably powerful for 1996. It has features such as "Go to definition", breakpoints, stacktrace, and variable inspections (but no Intellisense auto-completion yet). I never used it but it must have felt like a dream at the time." And here we are, in a generation of people writing blogs that never used VS6. I am now officially old. I was still using VS6 as late as 2009 btw...also it's from 1998. If you mad…

It feels now like an alternative timeline, one which performance optimisations were first and foremost still. Sometimes I fantasize, thinking how would our current development ecosystem look like, if we never abandoned the "be very vigilant with all resources you use" approach, that includes the whole webdev liftoff, where we ship a few hundred mb chromium engine for a dock app

We'd have far fewer apps, far fewer features, far more bugs, far more crashes, far less stability and far more memory safety vulnerabilities. Oh, and Linux and Mac would be far less usable.

The age of performance optimizations was the age of computers as little islands that didn't need to communicate with anybody or anything, and definitely not outside of a homogeneous LAN environment. It was the age of people having just one device, running one OS, with no expectation of data synchronization. Sharing files was, at best, done by sending quarterly_report_v14_approved_by_legal_fixed.doc over email. This is no longer the age we live in.

Re: Let's compile Quake like it's 1997

#35

Post by Narishma »

invader wrote: post #28
haspok wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but if you compare the complexity of (Turbo) Pascal to the complexity of C++... language, environment, libraries and cross-compilation... (A nice thought-experiment is to ask if Quake could have been coded in TP at all - even if memory hadn't been an issue (I think there was no DOS extender for TP, but I could be wrong).)

In the storm of Doom-Quake mania of the mid 90s there was Chasm: The Rift by a small Ukrainian company Action Forms. And if memory serves me right, it was created in Turbo Pascal. It was late in development and came out in 1997 after Quake, so it didn't get much traction. But the engine, though pretty limited, could produce 3D enemies with interesting effects not found even in Quake. So Turbo Pascal (with a whole bun…

> Chasm: The Rift

I might be misremembering but I thought it was more of a Doom-style engine with 3d models instead of sprites for the entities, rather than a full 3d engine like Quake.

Re: Let's compile Quake like it's 1997

#36

Post by pjmlp »

kristopolous wrote: post #3

"VC++6 is remarkably powerful for 1996. It has features such as "Go to definition", breakpoints, stacktrace, and variable inspections (but no Intellisense auto-completion yet). I never used it but it must have felt like a dream at the time." And here we are, in a generation of people writing blogs that never used VS6. I am now officially old. I was still using VS6 as late as 2009 btw...also it's from 1998. If you mad…

Many of those features were already available in MS-DOS and Windows 3.x IDEs from Borland for Turbo Pascal and C++.

Which is why when I got into UNIX development felt like going into the stone age of development tools, thankfully XEmacs was already there.

Which by the way, it was born for Energize C++, in 1993!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQQTScuApWk

Also here is what NeXTSTEP development environment looked like, used for Quake tooling development, in a 1991 marketing video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg

Which is why, I usually assert I cannot understand the nostalgia of CLI and TUI, being there at the time, and not being able to use some of these systems, due to the amount of money they required.

Re: Let's compile Quake like it's 1997

#37

Post by pjmlp »

adrian_b wrote: post #26
DanielHB wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turbo Pascal had breakpoints, variable inspections in the late 80s. I think it had stack traces too but not 100% sure. I am not old enough to have used it professionally, but my teacher used it for teaching intro programming in the early 2000s. So I used it quite a lot, the debugger was great and the development loop was so tight. Not until I got into web dev did it ever feel "fast" to make change->see change. To thi…

The earlier Microsoft compilers included since 1985 the debugger CodeView, which could do all that and much more. Around 1990, the development tools offered by Borland and Microsoft for C and C++ were pretty much equivalent and they both were quite good. While the Borland languages were like "Turbo-X", the Microsoft languages were like "Quick-X". The greatest difference between the commercial software available at th…

I think there was a certain irony, that Borland gave up on Turbo BASIC, while Microsoft gave up on Quick Pascal.

Re: Let's compile Quake like it's 1997

#38

Post by joe_mamba »

pjmlp wrote: post #36
kristopolous wrote: post #3

"VC++6 is remarkably powerful for 1996. It has features such as "Go to definition", breakpoints, stacktrace, and variable inspections (but no Intellisense auto-completion yet). I never used it but it must have felt like a dream at the time." And here we are, in a generation of people writing blogs that never used VS6. I am now officially old. I was still using VS6 as late as 2009 btw...also it's from 1998. If you mad…

Many of those features were already available in MS-DOS and Windows 3.x IDEs from Borland for Turbo Pascal and C++. Which is why when I got into UNIX development felt like going into the stone age of development tools, thankfully XEmacs was already there. Which by the way, it was born for Energize C++, in 1993! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQQTScuApWk Also here is what NeXTSTEP development environment looked like,…

>Which is why, I usually assert I cannot understand the nostalgia of CLI and TUI

Elitism

Re: Let's compile Quake like it's 1997

#39

Post by pjmlp »

joe_mamba wrote: post #38
pjmlp wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of those features were already available in MS-DOS and Windows 3.x IDEs from Borland for Turbo Pascal and C++. Which is why when I got into UNIX development felt like going into the stone age of development tools, thankfully XEmacs was already there. Which by the way, it was born for Energize C++, in 1993! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQQTScuApWk Also here is what NeXTSTEP development environment looked like,…

>Which is why, I usually assert I cannot understand the nostalgia of CLI and TUI Elitism

Yeah, right. :)

https://www.reddit.com/r/cinescenes/comments/18h22ug/hackers...

Re: Let's compile Quake like it's 1997

#40

Post by georgeecollins »

DanielHB wrote: post #9
kristopolous wrote: post #3

"VC++6 is remarkably powerful for 1996. It has features such as "Go to definition", breakpoints, stacktrace, and variable inspections (but no Intellisense auto-completion yet). I never used it but it must have felt like a dream at the time." And here we are, in a generation of people writing blogs that never used VS6. I am now officially old. I was still using VS6 as late as 2009 btw...also it's from 1998. If you mad…

Turbo Pascal had breakpoints, variable inspections in the late 80s. I think it had stack traces too but not 100% sure. I am not old enough to have used it professionally, but my teacher used it for teaching intro programming in the early 2000s. So I used it quite a lot, the debugger was great and the development loop was so tight. Not until I got into web dev did it ever feel "fast" to make change->see change. To thi…

Turbo Pascal was amazing for its time. As a young person learning programming it was a step change in functionality. Before that on PCs you were using Basic or assembly It was cheap and incredibly useful.
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