QuakeCon 2011 - John Carmack Keynote | Hacker News Reader

QuakeCon 2011 - John Carmack Keynote

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19 pointsmalkia7 comments

The guy basically wrote an operating system (That's what megatexture really is, a complete OS VM and scheduling system) he's remarkably calm about it. Lesser men would be brag left and right about 1/10th of that sort of accomplishment.

This guy is just awesome, i can only imagine how broad his knowledge as a graphics programmer must be going through all this from the very beginning, always delivering next generation gaming engines. Also love the fact that hes still a die hard coder after 20 years of doing this and doesnt want to stop anytime soon. Not to forget that he is a part-time rocket scientist :) Love this man!

He mentions that he would like to use Haskell or OCaml at 1h10m25s (http://youtu.be/4zgYG-_ha28?t=1h10m25s).

This was pretty different from most keynotes you usually see - he is very sincere about what could be better, that the game could have looked better if they ran it at 30fps instead of 60fps, what Intel could do better on their graphic chips, differences of developing for the PC vs consoles, how they could use being able to distribute more data than they can, ... Perhaps because he can do that because he's the boss?

He talks about static code analysis tools around 55 minutes.

tl;dw: he looked at Coverity, found it expensive. They are now using Microsoft Analyze tools (appears to be something that comes with higher end versions of Visual Studio, Pvs Studio and PC Lint.

More excerpts:

- "We're trying to write better code from the beginning in some ways."

- "One of the lessons we took from Doom3 is that script interpreters are bad from a performance, development, debugging standpoint."

- "Rage still haves a little bit of script, from Doom3" (he means that in a bad way).

- "In Doom4 we have something call Superscript, its scripting in a subset of C++..." (???)

- "I'm all about trying to be nuch more restrictive about what we can do."

- "I'm very tempted to wanna move to a functional language, Haskell or OCaml or something. But that is not a credible thing to do in the game industry. Because again, 49 people on our list.. I could probably convince a handful of them that we should move to a new language... but then, we're back to having performance issues, having a huge educational and hiring problem... so we got to stay with something that is C/C++ish based on there. But I think that it would be worthwhile to have restrictions to 95% of our code limit us to essentially the Java subset of C++, no unchecked arrays..."

- "I write all my new code in pseudo-functional, but unless something is made impossible it will still creep into your codebase."

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