undefuser

While it sounds interesting, I'm not sure in which scenario do I pick this over Redis

There are probably many reasons why this engine was not adopted by devs. For me, the last time I tried, the performance was terrible even in the most trivial test map. I dropped it instantly.

Can these server instances run traditional 3D applications, like games or CAD?

You can consider Affinity Photo

Could you provide some pointers to resources that explain clearly how Solana's consensus protocol and its Proof of History work? I read the whitepaper, watched a couple of videos but still find it unclear. As some other people said, it is not different from Bitcoin's mechanism with difficulty of zero.

Thanks for the information, that is very useful. Do you have a list of “gotchas” to watch out for while working with Solana, or blockchains in general?

Could you please outline clearly how blockchain wil be used in your example? Like what kind of information are stored on the blockchain, how smart contracts are utilized, how do drivers and consumers interact with the system?

Probably because floats can represent ints, but not the other way around?

Is there any plans for supporting Windows developers?

Except the change to XCode is a direct conflict of interest with moving MacBooks to ARM platform. If they are moving to ARM soon, there is no point in adding a brand new feature to the IDE that helps convert ARM apps to x86 apps. The reason Apple is doing so is due to the new Ipad OS that resembles desktop interface.

Lack of features can be a good thing. There will be no “language feature anxiety” for the people who is writing code. The code is easier to comprehend for new people who just joined an ongoing project, because there are no non-obvious execution flows. And C code can be compiled so much faster than C++ due to the language being simpler.

No where did I say that the GC hindered Unity's boom in anyway. In fact I do agree that the GC, together with C#, allowed Unity to be wildly successful. But it did so by allow too many people to write sloppy code that has performance problems. And that code would leak memory all over the place without the GC. It is sort of eroding the art of programming.

Indeed, you can always say that avoid GC, avoid allocations on the hot path, but then in practice people write sloppy code all the time, then trip over by the GC, I'm guilty of it myself on numerous occasions in the past. Maybe, just maybe, without the GC in the first place, people are forced to write better code? The same thing goes for OOP. In particular, inheritance is severly abused in too many code bases, that then causes all sort of problems. IDK, maybe because I hold an extreme view about those things, that they are better off being left out completely? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Well I wasn't arguing with that claim, but rather pjmpl's references to what Tim and John said, that I believe should be taken with a grain of salt.

With regards to GC, do check out Unity3D new ECS/Job system/burst compiler. Essentially sidestepping the garbage collector, C# safety checks, while trying to work with the how the new generation of CPUs are designed to perform.

Not surprised to see such things created with Unreal because they have loads of money and man power to throw at problems. But then again the 2 examples you show does not really fairly represent anything, because the raytracing demo uses super expensive Nvidia hardware that not many people can touch, the second demo also requires specific mocap hardware and there's only one character active in the whole scene. Data oriented is still relatively new, give it some time. But I would say if Unreal 4 was written with data oriented design in the first place, it would have been much better, at least performance wise. Even if it is a mixture of OOP and DOD, no one says you cannot do that. It was a lost opportunity. Working with it right now is a pain, really. After all, if the engine's performance is already so great, why did they need to spend so much time fixing performance problems in their latest releases?

If you want to see what data oriented design can do, with regards to games, you can check out Unity's lastest show of their beta ECS and Job systems. And their custom C# compiler called Burst. Essentially sidestepping the Garbage collector, compile away many of C# safety features, like bounds check, under specific conditions. While processing entities in straight array iteration fashion. All in the name of performance, undoing the damages caused in the past. I guess you know that newer generations of CPUs require effective use of the cache as well as multithreading to extract the full power out. At least Unity technologies should be applauded for trying to do that, and for trying to bring it to the mass.

I'm pretty sure that many game engines do use data oriented design to some capacity, especially those that used to run on PS3. But just because they are not available off-the-shelf, no source code to look at, doesn't mean they don't exist. Off the top of my head is Insomniac Games, arguably successful studio which is also a strong advocate of DOD.

All this is to say that there are times when even the legends hold questionable beliefs, which we should take with a grain of salt.

Honestly, this is a poor argument. While both Tim Sweeney and John Carmack are legends of the gaming industry, their opinions are still should be taken with a pinch of salt.

Here's why: both Unreal Engine 3 and Unreal Engine 4 are giant OOP behemoths that powers sluggish games and sluggish editors. They consume a rediculous amount of memory, especially in large projects. Even in the slides you linked, they admitted that there is no obvious way to optimize the engine or scale it over multiple cores, because its performance suffers from death by a thousand cuts. Recently Epic spent a huge amount of time trying to optimize their garbage collector, which, arguably, without it they could have better spent the man hours elsewhere. And then there's the new network replication blueprint which is designed to overcome OOP performance issue. And Tim Sweeney swears by OOP. All of these while the industry is moving more and more towards Data Oriented design. Regarding John's tweet, an interesting question was that could he have built the successful Doom games with BASIC? Most likely no.

Woohoo, low latency counter strike from Asia to US!

Another Vietnamese here. I have been oversea for a while so I don't know how exactly things have changed over the years, but in my time things were totally different from this. When I was in primary school, they didn't teach anything related to programming. Only when I got to grade 8 that we got to learn Pascal (which I decided to pick up myself since grade 6). Most of my friends struggled big time with it in the next 5 years. They didn't even understand the basic concepts. But I guess the one to be blamed is the way programming was being taught back then. It did not create any motivations for people to study. So I'm glad that it has changed, for the better.

Regarding the part where author said "Vietnam is a 100% Windows XP monoculture" is not quite true. Especially in the recent years. Many people have adopted Windows 7 and even Windows 8, and stuff like Android smartphones or iPhone are getting more and more prevalent. I guess what happened is that schools don't have the budget to upgrade both software and hardware. That will take some time.