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Comment by kwertyoowiyop | Hacker News Reader

Gotta say that was a bad choice even then.

By what measure? It's a great game, that people still talk about, ran more smoothly than a lot of current title. And it sounds like he knew the language. So how was this a bad choice?

He could’ve gotten essentially equivalent performance writing it mostly in C, with only the time-critical parts in assembly. Assuming equivalent knowledge of C, it would’ve been quicker to write, easier to update and port, and easier for others to work with the code.

Not to sound rude, but this mostly seem like "random" assumptions, even on the goals side.

Was there others to work on the code? Was portability a goal? Would it matter if the interface is a C for DirectX anyways?

You don’t sound rude. These assumptions are common for games in general, but who knows what the assumptions were for this game in particular? Or whether this programmer knew C well at the time? Or if Microsoft was likely to ask for ports or updates?

Maybe. Maybe not. The C compilers back then were not as good at optimising machine code as modern C compilers are.

It was possible: profile your program to find the hotspots, rewrite those in assembly, rinse and repeat.

My Prof. once said that the only difference between writing assembly and coding in a high-level language is that you have to type more.

And that opinion would probably turn grey on HN. At best, it's a not-so-funny joke.

That is technically correct. Which is the best kind of correct.

Bad choice that netted Chris a bunch of money and made iconic games. It's not stupid if it works.

Totally. The sausage factory makes delicious sausage, but you might not want to see inside!

Have you ever programmed in assembly? Code that I wrote 20 years ago in Motorola 68000 assembly is easy to read and understand for me today. While I have seen “modern” code written in modern languages (by other people) that made me want to throw up and/or throw things at those people :)

Yes, though not for a long time now. 68000 was actually some of the hardest for me to deal with, when folks would creatively use EVERY register…and in a different way in each procedure.

But of course you are right, good and bad code has been written in every language. And guess what folks, your code is NOT “self-documenting,” you’re just being lazy by not writing comments! OK, soapbox ended! :-)

> good and bad code has been written in every language

Yes indeed. There seems to be no limit to how bad code can be written in any programming language :)

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