HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

Reading through this reminded me a lot of what Jon Blow has been saying [1] about programming as he's been writing his new language specifically tailored for games. He talks about how ridiculous it is that C++ compiles can eat up so much time in a programmer's day, and how programmers are not generally taught how to write efficient data structures and thing about things like locality and access patterns.

And that's when you can reason about the access patterns. When you're running things out of a browser, you are even further removed from the metal and likely using a grab bag of web frameworks and libraries that you don't control (or fully understand). And it's easier to keep using them rather than think about what it would take to make things run well and invest in that future. (You may not even have the ability to make that decision).

Luckily, it does seem that people are becoming aware of the issue, at least in some circles. I've now seen a number of articles with titles like "Why I have turned my back on the church of Object Oriented Programming," and with people like Mike Acton speaking at cppcon [2] to talk about data structuring, hopefully the next generations of application developers will be equipped to make things fast again.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLk4eiGUic8

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc

⬐ jchw

It feels like large parts of the reason C++ compilation is slow could be solved by modules. Maybe some day?

He started with two backends. One generates bytecode for an internal interpreter, and this is still needed because all Jai code can be run at compile time. The other backend generates C code, but it's a temporary measure. He just added the LLVM backend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLk4eiGUic8

⬐ megabochen

oh thanks, I didn't see the last one :)

Also that language Jonathan Blow is working on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLk4eiGUic8