Comment by hi_dang_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hi_dang_ | Hacker News Reader

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Very anecdotal but of the people I know in game studios who are tasked with engine work, and people who make a killing doing FPGA work for HFT firms, both camps shook their head at Casey’s HMH thing. Uniformly I do not know of a single professional developer of this sort of caliber who looked at HMH and thought it looks great. Quite the opposite. I think they found his approach and justifications unsound as it would instil awful practices of premature unfounded optimization and a disdain for normal library code in favour of hand-rolling your own half-baked implementations based on outdated trivia. I agree with them on the basis that HMH exposed an unprepared and inexperienced audience to something that has to be regarded with utmost care. For this, I refer to Jonathan Blow’s presentation of “a list is probably good enough” as an antidote. I think JB’s recommendations are more in line with actual practices, whereas Casey just raised red flags uniformly from here-and-now engine devs shipping multi platform games.

I have not watched Handmade Hero, so I can't offer any comments any their comments based on factual claims about the software. A few things though:

I am not linking to handmade hero, I'm linking to a separate project of his (his performance aware programming course) that is actually aimed at being an educational piece.

I lied, I will comment on one factual piece. "normal library code in favour of hand-rolling your own half-baked implementations based on outdated trivia." Yes, that is the whole point of the series (not the characterization as half-based and outdated trivia). The point was to show how to build a game (and its engine) from scratch to as big of a degree as possible. The avowing of library code is the point, to show what it takes to build engines rather than call a library so that the industry has more people who would even attempt doing such a thing.

Equally anecdotally, based on available online information, he worked for a long time on core technologies at RAD Game tools, a company which essentially every gamer, expect maybe pure mobile gamers, has purchased a game that used their technology. It may be possible that he acts (or acted in HMH) based on outdated trivia and favoured premature unfounded optimization, but I find it hard to believe based on the content of his I've engaged with and his track record.

Casey's a fundamentalist, in the religious extremist sense. Just as a theologian might have something to learn from the most extremely devout, so it is that there is valuable information in Casey's proselytizing.

But you should no more follow Casey in form and function than you would any other fundamentalist.

While gesturing at religion and saying he's a fundamentalist is an easy rhetorical technique, it doesn't add much. Yes good resources do exist, but they are few and far between. The number of new undergraduates from cs or software engineering who learned to think in the ways needed to make low latency applications are a rounding error based on my experience with them. Most forgot it, weren't taught it well, or never saw it at all. They are more worried about learning the syntax of the current hot framework rather than on anything even resembling "Avoid copies, never allocate, keep the hot path local".

The religious comparison is also a telling one given the state of the industry; for we aren't the theologian, we're the common folk looking for someone or something to follow in order to write better code.

Who are Casey's alternatives? Gesturing the cppcon as a learning resource has "read research papers to learn about a field" vibes. They can be highly informative and worth the effort, but not for beginners.

Who are Casey's contemporaries? If he's a fundamentalist then the atheists are nowhere to be seen by the beginners. Instead we have agile ceremony shamans, clean code bible missionaries, tdd doomsday cults, oop/rust/haskell/etc. zealots, a thriving megachurch industry of Lambda schools, and the mother of all cargo cults masquerading as web dev.

Agree there are not enough performance zealots. Modern architectures are almost magically fast if you get all of the tiny invisible things that kill your performance sorted out correctly. The fact that the knowledge of how to achieve this is closer to black magic lore than foundational educational knowledge is sad.

Performance is surprisingly often a feature. When things become instantly fast, instead of horribly slow, new opportunities are suddenly feasible for a lot of things.

> The fact that the knowledge of how to achieve this is closer to black magic lore than foundational educational knowledge is sad.

It is sad, doubly so since the things you need to get within an order of magnitude of what your hardware can do aren't the arcane assembly and "premature optimization" boogeymen students picture. Forget the 10x engineer, going from the 0.0001x engineer to the 0.1x would be a massive improvement and it's low hanging fruit.

They're simple things: have your code do less, learn what good performance should be, understand the hardware and internalize that the point is to program it, and use/build better tools (e.g. perhaps your programming model is fundamentally flawed if it essentially incentivizes things like the N+1 Selects Problem).

> Performance is surprisingly often a feature.

Performance is, unsurprisingly, often a missing feature in most software. Every day I need to boot up Teams I feel we stray further from Moore's light.

Totally agree on all points!

The whole point of Handmade Hero is to make everything from scratch as a learning exercise, so using third-party libraries would be counter-productive.

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