Let's compile Quake like it's 1997

Post by pjmlp » Sat, May 30, 2026, 9:31 AM UTC

kristopolous wrote: post #64

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,…

The appeal of the cli/tui is because agents can use them better and because people want to ssh in and just use something without any fuss or lag And I know the hn reply, it's "what do you mean? all you have to do is this other thing over here" and that's the point ... people don't want to. So they don't.

Post by pjmlp » Sat, May 30, 2026, 9:39 AM UTC

haspok wrote: post #11

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…

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).)

Post by manytimesaway » Sun, May 31, 2026, 12:23 AM UTC

miki123211 wrote: post #34

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

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…

Post by Sophira » Sun, May 31, 2026, 3:43 AM UTC

tosti wrote: post #51

bityard wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Post by Suppafly » Sun, May 31, 2026, 4:18 AM UTC

fasterik wrote: post #60

I hope this means that Fabien is working on another Game Engine Black Book. I really love these deep dives and historical preservation of 1990's game tech. https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbwolf3d/ https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbdoom/