Comment by greybox | Hacker News Reader

Comment by greybox | Hacker News Reader

You make some very good points here. I've watched the talk too and criticism of it is important.

I have to say though Blow is right when he says: "you can't just Draw pixels to the screen"

I am a game engine programmer at a 'medium sized' games company and it is becoming VERY difficult to hire anyone to work on graphics code. DX12 (and others of the same generation) is a massive step up from what previous generations (DX11) used to demand of the programmer. Doing anything at all with these APIs is a massive task and by Microsoft's own admission (I can't find the quote from the docs anymore, citation needed), DX12 is extremely difficult to learn without experience with previous graphics APIs.

I see a lot of people using the argument: "but these APIs are only for developers that want to really push the limits of what the graphics card can do, and want to implement very low level optimizations." and that's partially true. But it's now the industry standard and it's nigh-on unteachable to anyone without previous experience.

Unless something changes, the hiring pool is going to continue to decrease in size.

Blow's talk made me realize I'm not crazy when I get frustrated about basic things being incredibly difficult. Drawing a button to the screen when you want to build a software application has become so difficult that most people just use a progressive web app which is 100x slower than is possible. Are the best options for GUI applications in 2025 really Java Swing and Qt?

Putting pixels on the screen isn't difficult. Putting them on a screen across hardware in a performant manner is the difficult part because it is difficult.

I agree with your point, but DX12 went in the opposite direction of abstraction: it's a much lower level API than the highly abstracted OpenGL.

Yet these "lower-level" APIs, DX12 and Vulcan, often don't significantly out perform DX11, and in many cases DX11 performs better. I put lower-level in quotes because those APIs bake assumptions about the hardware into their API which shouldn't be there to begin with because they frequently prevent drivers from getting the most out of the hardware.

> Unless something changes, the hiring pool is going to continue to decrease in size.

Or, we'll see the return of "trainees"?

I guess what needs to improve more than anything, is the teaching and documentation of these new APIs. There are over-arching ideas that pull things together, but they aren't alluded to in the documentation, you need to attend a training session, or speak to someone who has.

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