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John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

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Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#601

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF »

Aeolun wrote: post #285
WD-42 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which makes sense when you are one of 3 developers at ID software. There's absolutely no room for waste. This is Meta. Let the kids build their operating system ffs. Is he now more concerned with protecting shareholder value? Who cares.

No, no. If you want your VR apps running in two years on something that looks like an OS, just build an app that runs on an existing one. If you want to be the dominant player in the market in 10-15 years, build the OS and keep funding it.

I just can't believe that an OS needs to be forked off for such a workload

iPhones and Macs share a kernel and a large portion of user space and syscalls, right?

If the GPL is a problem just fork some BSD like the PS3 did, and pretend you're maintaining code that you already spent five years on

I know you need low latency for XR + VR + AR - everyone needs low latency for everything. So they could build on whatever has been done for audio and networking and Android touch screens that all want low latency too

I'm speaking foolishly from outside but making "an OS for" something is more commonly marketing speak than a good idea. Like this fucking "OS for cities" and "OS for work" stuff. That's an OS the way a cookie recipe is an OS for a fucking oven. The casual insistence on misunderstanding important things really gets my goats

Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#602

Post by WalterBright »

tux3 wrote: post #598
WalterBright wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know much of anything about him. Did he implement the preprocessor? the optimizer? the code generator? (For some context, back in the 80's, code generators needed enhancements to implement C++. You couldn't just use an existing one. Bjarne had to do some ugly workarounds because of this.)

Sean Baxter's circle compiler uses LLVM as a backend, but I believe the rest is from scratch. Arguably these days having a clear frontend/backend separation is good compiler architecture. It might slow down compile times a bit, but it's worth the cost.

It wouldn't have made much sense to write the preprocessor these days, too, but it is part of the C++ compiler. Unless integrating it with the C++ lexer for speed purposes, as I did.

Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#603

Post by torginus »

ronsor wrote: post #112
agsnu wrote: post #99

Huawei seem pretty committed to building their own OS and uncoupling from the Western technology stack in total https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarmonyOS_NEXT https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi24/presentation/chen-h...

The only reason Chinese companies can even get away with these big projects is because of state backing and state objectives. By itself, the market doesn't support a new general-purpose OS at this point.

'China only succeeds for evil reasons'

Besides, the statement's completely nonsensical - there were multiple OSes developed by for-profit corporations in the West (Microsoft, Apple, Nintendo, QNX, Be, etc.).

It's kind of an extraordinary statement that an OS couldn't be developed by a for-profit organization, especially if the hardware's somewhat fixed and you don't need to support every piece of equipment under the sun.

Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#604

Post by maxglute »

ronsor wrote: post #112
agsnu wrote: post #99

Huawei seem pretty committed to building their own OS and uncoupling from the Western technology stack in total https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarmonyOS_NEXT https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi24/presentation/chen-h...

The only reason Chinese companies can even get away with these big projects is because of state backing and state objectives. By itself, the market doesn't support a new general-purpose OS at this point.

lol the market has tons of support for OS that can't be sanctioned, especially Huawei, who you know is.

Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#605

Post by dilyevsky »

dehrmann wrote: post #579
leoc wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta's AR/VR division has burned a huge amount of money and years of time, with relatively little to show for it. Now it seems to be on the verge of being cancelled or slashed back, and in response people are saying that this proves VR, something Carmack champions, is commercially untenable or even that Carmack himself is partly responsible for the failed initiative. I don't even entirely agree with him on the questi…

AR/VR was always a side project for Zuck (like the Aquila airplane or the Libra cryptocurrency or AGI) that he works on because he's bored. It was pretty clear from the product's popularity and Metaverse experience that it didn't have any legs. Carmack had little to do with that one way or the other, and the Apple Vision pro shows that it's not an execution or quality issue, it's product-market fit.

Side project that they renamed entire company after

Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#606

Post by WalterBright »

Conscat wrote: post #586
WalterBright wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may be the only person who ever understood every detail of C++, starting with the preprocessor. I can make that claim because I'm the only person who ever implemented all of it. (You cannot really know a language until you've implemented it.) I gave up on that in the 2000's. Modern C++ is simply terrifying in its complexity. (I'm not including the C++ Standard Library, as I didn't implement it.)

Sean Baxter single-handedly implemented all of up to C++23, and some C++26, including a huge number of GNU extensions and possibly an even larger number of his own features.

Impressive!

Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#607

Post by vkazanov »

tux3 wrote: post #598
WalterBright wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know much of anything about him. Did he implement the preprocessor? the optimizer? the code generator? (For some context, back in the 80's, code generators needed enhancements to implement C++. You couldn't just use an existing one. Bjarne had to do some ugly workarounds because of this.)

Sean Baxter's circle compiler uses LLVM as a backend, but I believe the rest is from scratch. Arguably these days having a clear frontend/backend separation is good compiler architecture. It might slow down compile times a bit, but it's worth the cost.

So it sounds like he wrote the frontend of a cpp compiler? There's a lot of work in other layers as well.

Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#608

Post by adolph »

Another example of a new OS developed by a vendor is DryOS by Canon [0] as a replacement for WindRiver VxWorks[1]. It has been extensively explore by the chdk community of custom software extensions for Canon cameras. It appears to have some compatibility with Linux in some form.

In my non-expert mind, an OS for "foveated rendering" would be similar to what many cameras prioritize and more likely be similar to an "realtime OS" of some sort. OTOH, Apple's goggles use the XNU kernel, so maybe a microkernel would be sufficiently realtime, similar to QNX often used for automotive applications [4].

0. https://web.archive.org/web/20190214134247/http://www.canon....

1. https://www.windriver.com/

2. https://chdk.fandom.com/wiki/For_Developers

3. https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QNX

Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#609

Post by msgodel »

adolph wrote: post #608

Another example of a new OS developed by a vendor is DryOS by Canon [0] as a replacement for WindRiver VxWorks[1]. It has been extensively explore by the chdk community of custom software extensions for Canon cameras. It appears to have some compatibility with Linux in some form. In my non-expert mind, an OS for "foveated rendering" would be similar to what many cameras prioritize and more likely be similar to an "re…

Microkernels are normally pretty slow. It takes a lot of extra effort to make them fast.

Realistically there's no reason Linux wouldn't be fine on its own for AR and in fact I'm typing this on Linux on some AR glasses right now.

Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#610

Post by markus_zhang »

cherrycherry98 wrote: post #256
markus_zhang wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Impressive. JC is always one of the engineers I look up to and read up to when depressed. John Carmack, David Cutler, Tom West, Cameron Zwarich, etc. There are about maybe 50 of them.

Tim Sweeney of Epic is up there for me too.

I’d really love to hear his story from the beginning. I believe his first published game was a Blue Disk one, ZZT, in 1991, and he went forward to write the Unreal engine which was released in 1998. People like Tim and John really could bag a huge amount of knowledge in half a decade.
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