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Comment by sedatk | Hacker News Reader

This is apparently for improving the performance of Wine emulator on Linux mainly, not native Linux games like the headline suggests.

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> Wine emulator

Wine stands for "Wine Is Not an Emulator".

The Wine is Not an Emulator emulator

Yeah, seriously. It's not emulating a processor, but it is emulating an API. I think the only reason it's not called Windows Emulator is (probably well-founded) concern about getting sued for trademark violation.

Citation with detailed history: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13476390

Would it be useful to native programs?

Wine is a native program, so yes. But it is a niche facility that Wine benefits from, and other programs that handle a lot of locks/queues also do, but may not directly benefit Linux native game performance.

Valve's post suggests that they believe this to be the case, although they didn't explain the specific details.

> We think that if this feature (or an equivalent) was adopted upstream, we would achieve efficiency gains by adopting it in native massively-threaded applications such as Steam and the Source 2 engine.

I got that. I intended to go for "actually useful".

Source 2 has a linux port I believe, and it's an engine that other games could (do?) use to get easy linux support for a lot of their codebase. I think that counts for actually useful.

Depending on what they mean by "massively-threaded", that might cover some other popular network applications that thread to handle requests, but I'm not sure how much work they would put into a linux specific solution if it complicated their codebase.

> (do?)

Indeed. See Dota 2.

It occurred to me that a message passing OO language that mapped every active object (that's responding to a message) to a thread could benefit from it.

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