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Comment by brazzy | Hacker News Reader

If a programmer back then doing crazy assembler stuff to get barely acceptable performance were given the option to work on today's hardware and write code that is portable across chips and operating systems, provided they never do any clever hacks - do you really think they'd refuse?

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That comparison as stated is a bit too extreme. However, I once had an Amiga programming wizard refuse a job because he didn't want to write C/C++ code for Windows PCs. He went on to do his magic on PSX and GBAs. In more recent times, there's plenty of hardcore programmers who have had a blast as PS3 SPU specialists.

Every time I see people complaining about Java, .NET, Go, and many other languages being slower than C or C++, I smile while remembering the same arguments being wrestled against Pascal dialects and C from Assembly developers back in those days.

And similar fun probably keeps going on the latest consoles, considering they have massive GPU sharing memory with the CPU, the devices even support atomic operations between GPU and CPU.

Incidentally that reminded me. How does one get to these positions? As the API's are closed there is no real way for an outsider to learn the ropes.

> How does one get to these positions?

- Deep understanding of low-level programming issues: assembly, architectures, caches, DMAs

- Experience doing advanced stuff in available platforms like OpenGL, DirectX, Cuda/OpenCL, etc.

- Fluency in Maths is not necessary for all low-level development, but will certainly be for physics and graphics work.

Check out places like http://directtovideo.wordpress.com/, http://www.iquilezles.org/www/index.htm and http://fgiesen.wordpress.com/. If you can show you even understand what they are talking about, you have a foot in the door. The rest is hand-on experience. :)

I meant more that I haven't really seen any open positions anywhere about positions like that, so I've thought it's more about who you know than what you know. I might be wrong though. Regarding skillset I pretty much have all of those. I have mostly thought that particular set of skills is not _that_ much needed (compared to <nodejs/C#/java/whatnot>)

Thanks about those links. While I'm well acquainted with iquilezles the other two were new for me.

The first link was especially interesting as I'm quite interesting in OpenCL raytracing, so that will save me a lot of research time in the near future, especially about the data structure selection. Interestingly with OpenCL 2.0 and devices that have shared memory anything that is fast to build on CPU and slow/open area of research on GPU can be pretty much ignored as the bottleneck between the two devices do not exist anymore.

I believe they found these "clever hacks" a funny part of their work.

I myself, for example, find these clever hacks very rewarding, maybe even more than finishing the stuff I'm working into.

I think you mean 'fun', not 'funny'. Fun means enjoyable and rewarding, while funny means humorous. (Not criticizing you, but if I am right, English is not your first language, and I'd appreciate the help if I were writing in Spanish.)

You are right =), I meant fun, not funny. (Spanish is my first language and I appreciate very much your clarification)

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