muchwhales

The way I see it: Memorizing puts things in your RAM (which may be slow to access), or CPU cache (if recently used). Looking them up would be equivalent to having them stored on your hard disk, or perhaps a remote system if you have to search a while to find them again. Clearly, this is a trade-off and the optimal approach depends on the specifics.

Wasn't there a math prof that did exactly that? Can't find the link now, but after some getting used to the results were overwhelmingly positive.

TBH, just staying at home and watching YouTube videos (on the same topics) is likely better than sitting in the average lecture, even if students don't want to read at all...

One point that wasn't mentioned: It has a performance-oriented alternative implementation, called LuaJIT.

With this, you can run JIT-compiled Lua code at speeds comparable to V8 (the NodeJS runtime), and almost as good as the Java VM (depending on the workload, YMMV). LuaJIT also includes a foreign function interface (FFI) for even closer integration with native code, which makes it almost trivial to use native libraries from Lua.

Essentially, this makes it easy to move logic to lower/higher levels of the stack when/if you need it: There's the three layers that are increasingly more difficult to use but faster (Lua -> FFI -> C/C++), and you can directly use gamedev-oriented C++ or even graphics APIs like WebGPU from Lua, without crippling performance or writing tons of glue code.

Note that I've worked with Lua for many years and I'm definitely biased. I've also worked with JavaScript/TypeScript-based engines, where my favorite is BabylonJS (it's great, but JS/browsers really aren't...). So if you don't want to learn Lua/C++ I can recommend looking into BabylonJS as a starting point - it will probably be easier to get something going thanks to the browser APIs.

"Where your audience is, go you must" - Master Yoda, probably

Just to give some perspective: Without prior graphics programming experience, I was able to write a simplistic 3D engine (VERY simple, but enough for my purposes) in a week or two. I somehow assumed that it was just an impossible thing to do and so I've never tried, until recently. It turned out to be much easier to get something going than I could've imagined.

It's true that Unity and other engines offer tons of features, but most indie developers probably won't need them, and by the time they do need more than the basics they'll have so much experience that they can easily implement what's missing in their own "engine".

We're also seeing some interesting developments in this space with WebGPU, which is what prompted me to finally give it a try in the first place. I've never used OpenGL before and I was still able to get by (more or less), after failing miserably to complete the Vulkan tutorial...

If nothing else, I can only recommend people at least think about whether they really need Unity/Unreal and consider that there are disadvantages as well as advantages when using them.

New feed? It's an abomination.

My workaround: Discord bot with WebHooks set up for only the things I care about.