Hacker News: cshenton

New comment by cshenton in "Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years"

cshenton — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 20:32:39 +0000

My experience is that the ecosystem is a mess, have hit winit, wgpu, and countless bevy bugs, iteration times are abysmal, documentation is nonexistent. In the time it would take me to make a game in popular Rust tooling I could build the game and engine from scratch in C and also have something that would crash less.

New comment by cshenton in "GPU compute in the browser at the speed of native: WebGPU marching cubes"

cshenton — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 20:20:46 +0000

You absolutely cannot implement stream compaction “at the speed of native” as WebGPU is missing the wave/subgroup intrinsics and globally coherent memory necessary to do that efficiently as possible.

New comment by cshenton in "My personal C coding style as of late 2023"

cshenton — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 01:09:29 +0000

Really lovely. A lot here reminds me of design in Odin lang. Short integral types, no const, composite returns over out params. Big fan of the approach of designing for a single translation unit and exploiting the optimisations that provides from RVO etc.

New comment by cshenton in "Small joys of programming in Odin"

cshenton — Sat, 22 Jul 2023 00:30:53 +0000

Odin is lovely and a great fit for graphics and games programming. I’ve been doing my real time graphics research in it (the CPU parts at least).

New comment by cshenton in "Stop Saying C/C++"

cshenton — Fri, 19 May 2023 01:21:50 +0000

Absolutely! On a related note, looking for C development jobs is a real pain for this reason.

New comment by cshenton in "Learning Modern 3D Graphics Programming (2012)"

cshenton — Wed, 28 Dec 2022 23:49:19 +0000

I personally find the experience of writing GPU compute code pretty nice on graphics APIs. The interface is pretty much the same “dispatch a 1-3D set of 1-3D work group indices”.

The main pain points vs dedicated compute stuff like cuda is libraries and boilerplate to manage memory and launch kernels.

New comment by cshenton in "Learning Modern 3D Graphics Programming (2012)"

cshenton — Wed, 28 Dec 2022 23:47:03 +0000

For 3D, use a game engine. Unity, Unreal, maybe Godot depending on your perf requirements.

New comment by cshenton in "Learning Modern 3D Graphics Programming (2012)"

cshenton — Wed, 28 Dec 2022 23:46:06 +0000

When you look at how much nicer the programming experience is for something like Metal it’s hard to blame them.

Think I’d prefer to write 3 backends for Metal level complexity APIs than a single one targeting Vulkan.

New comment by cshenton in "Learning Modern 3D Graphics Programming (2012)"

cshenton — Wed, 28 Dec 2022 23:44:02 +0000

If someone wants to get into graphics API programming that’s probably a bit too high level, as lovely as it is.

New comment by cshenton in "Learning Modern 3D Graphics Programming (2012)"

cshenton — Wed, 28 Dec 2022 23:42:50 +0000

I know you mean major desktop platforms, but in terms of market share for real time 3D applications, mobile and console dwarf Mac and Linux.

New comment by cshenton in "Nuklear – A single-header ANSI C immediate mode cross-platform GUI library"

cshenton — Fri, 23 Dec 2022 21:58:42 +0000

Not faster to integrate it into a build system or compile it though.

New comment by cshenton in "Nuklear – A single-header ANSI C immediate mode cross-platform GUI library"

cshenton — Fri, 23 Dec 2022 21:56:37 +0000

I suspect (1) is just because Dear ImGui is BYO graphics backend, so it doing lots of clever texture management stuff for lots of images would increase the surface area of that integration which would make it harder to use for most folks.

New comment by cshenton in "Nuklear – A single-header ANSI C immediate mode cross-platform GUI library"

cshenton — Fri, 23 Dec 2022 21:51:14 +0000

Dear ImGui certainly seems more popular wherever skinning isn’t a priority (though I’ve seen games use it even for user facing UI). It’s become a bit of a Wilhelm scream, love spotting it in the wild.

New comment by cshenton in "I like Odin"

cshenton — Mon, 29 Aug 2022 08:14:57 +0000

Odin is probably the most productive I’ve been in a language. I went from reading the docs to having a working interactive PBD particle sim in VR via OpenXR in around 48 hours wall clock time.

I am currently writing a rigid body engine in it. It is perfect for graphics/games programming.

New comment by cshenton in "Stable Diffusion Public Release"

cshenton — Mon, 22 Aug 2022 23:45:43 +0000

This is completely wrong, the digital art industry is enormous and, mind you, pretty uniformly pissed off that this model has been trained off of their non public-domain work.

New comment by cshenton in "Negative incentives in academic research"

cshenton — Fri, 22 Jul 2022 00:34:52 +0000

Another interesting factor. PhD stipends are getting gobbled up by inflation. I wonder how many people will forgo starting a research career because they want to be able to pay rent.

New comment by cshenton in "Modern cloud for multiplayer games"

cshenton — Fri, 01 Jul 2022 03:47:12 +0000

What are your egress charges?

New comment by cshenton in "DevOps is a failure"

cshenton — Sun, 26 Jun 2022 23:14:28 +0000

Why not all of the above?

New comment by cshenton in "Bayesian Workflow (2020)"

cshenton — Sat, 25 Jun 2022 23:30:54 +0000

Also worth pointing out that Bayesian methods are the only good option when performing data assimilation into large scale simulators (like epidemic models) which are typically statistically under identified by available data. So this stuff is very relevant!

New comment by cshenton in "Bayesian Workflow (2020)"

cshenton — Sat, 25 Jun 2022 23:29:14 +0000

Bayesian statistics gets tonnes of practical use. Software packages like STAN-MC get lots of use in traditional stats/econometric circles, while probabilistic programming languages like Turing, Edward, and PyMC get plenty of use elsewhere. Developing algorithms to sample from or solve for the posterior distribution given an arbitrary prior and likelihood is an active area of research. If you want stuff to google, relevant families of algorithms are Variational Inference, Approximate Bayesian Computation, Markov Chain Monte Carlo, and Particle Filters / SMC. However there’s a few newer families of algorithms that have popped up in recent years.