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Let's compile Quake like it's 1997

fabiensanglard.net

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

#51

Post by tosti »

bityard wrote: post #31
eurekin wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A friend of mine installed MS-Windows 95 on a 386 and Weird Al Yankovic nailed it:

But my machine, it's obsolete. It takes an hour just to bring up the screen!

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

#52

Post by tosti »

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…

The problem wasn't the IDE, but win32 API documentation was very poorly written back then and lots of programs suffered because of it.

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

#53

Post by NuclearPM »

tosti wrote: post #52
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…

The problem wasn't the IDE, but win32 API documentation was very poorly written back then and lots of programs suffered because of it.

That’s what this was for:

https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/programming-windows-95-microso...

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

#54

Post by galangalalgol »

kristopolous wrote: post #13
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…

That wasn't the banger for vs6 it was the workflow and muscle memory of the thing. The flow is still unmatched IMHO. It was like avid or photoshop for writing windows software. Default keys in modern IDEs are basically still the vs assignments from the 5/6 era. It was the closest Microsoft ever came to making their own emacs or vim. vs6 was like 90% of my screen time as a windows dev in the 90s and 2000s I've been a…

I find vscode with the right plugins better than vs6 was by a long shot. Helix is pretty amazing too.

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

#55

Post by skydhash »

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, being there at the time, and not being able to use some of these systems, due to the amount of money they required.

I was not there at the time, but one appeal of CLI (not TUI) is scripting. After a while, you have all your routine packaged in nice alias and commands. And that’s universal across all languages and projects.

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

#56

Post by rahen »

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,…

[dead]

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

#57

Post by tom_ »

wk_end wrote: post #50
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…

I could've sworn VC++6 had Intellisense. I'm not going to dig too far to confirm but Wikipedia seems to agree with me ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_completion#Visual_Studio ) - it's not a great reference but definitely implies that it was there: > the Visual Basic versions of IntelliSense were always more robust and complete than the 5.0 and 6.0 (97 and 98 in the Visual Studio naming sequence) versions of Visu…

I'm also pretty certain it did, and actually that VC++5 (that I'd used as a student) didn't. I'm less confident about go to definition and stuff, but I think that was all part and parcel of the same thing, so VC++6 had it and VC++5 didn't.

(Just like today, it would sometimes fail to work, for no obvious reason, and it was impossible to figure out why, so perhaps for this article it had got itself into one of those situations...)

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

#58

Post by pjmlp »

skydhash wrote: post #55
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, being there at the time, and not being able to use some of these systems, due to the amount of money they required. I was not there at the time, but one appeal of CLI (not TUI) is scripting. After a while, you have all your routine packaged in nice alias and commands. And that’s universal across all languages and projects.

That is achievable with proper REPLs.

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

#59

Post by pjmlp »

i_am_a_peasant wrote: post #45
joe_mamba wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

sometimes you wanna do debugging on a device that has no screen or ethernet port too

Debugging can be done even by serial ports and JTAG.
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