Reboot Develop 2017 - Jonathan Blow, Thekla Inc. / Making Game Programming Less Terrible

Speaker: Jonathan Blow, Thekla Inc.
Topic: Making Game Programming Less Terrible

[ethanviolet]

I swear any time something important is happening on the screen they put it at this weird angle that makes it impossible to see anything

[ninomojo]

Pro tip for whoever edited this video: how about cutting to the wider shot where we can see the slides when the speaker is pointing at them and talking about them, and not freaking randomly?

[Gnurklesquimp]

Sometime I start the Godot engine just for the satisfaction of how fast it loads.

[hasen]

23:30 Linker takes 0.16 seconds. JB: man, linkers are so slow!

Meanwhile, web-developers: our page takes 5 seconds to load; seems good enough! No need to optimize further! That would be premature optimization!

[ifstatementifstatement]

Jonathan is always really interesting to listen to.

[karpopper]

this is why i prefer doing game development on terrible computers, you know your software is efficient if it can run on a potato.

[equivocator]

I'm waiting in anticipation to try this language out. After developing a fast, multi-threaded game engine using Vulkan in C++, I 100% support most of these design ideas. I know I would have a lot more hair left if I didn't have to write so many hacks just to make something that's abstract-enough to use in writing actual game code while also maintaining a Data-Oriented layout.
I think I'm most excited about how structs and inheritance are handled. If I didn't have to enumerate every new entity, that would significantly reduce the strain of writing new features and debugging them.

[ttdytiv]

Q&A

50:15 Will Jai support easy rearrangement of data structures for performance?
52:45 Will Jai work with existing code such as C/C++ libraries?
55:10 Will Jai support Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation?
57:25 Will Jai handle optimized code generation within the compiler or use an external tool such as LLVM?

1:00:32 Are you implying that if Adobe Photoshop was rewritten in Jai then it would run faster?

6:47 - 7:20 Thank you, whoever edited this video.

[theonewithoutidentity]

He'd be enraged to learn that current Photoshop CC loads several times slower than his version. On my older computer which didn't have an SSD, it frequently took between 2-4 minutes to load. On my current machine, with an M.2 drive, it takes between 17-30 seconds. Insane!

[zany]

I admire Jonathan blow, he's a kind of developer I want to be someday, he cares about important topics, for a regular user 7 seconds it's nothing,
We are starting to degrade because we got used to ”just 7 seconds ” because of developers like Jonathan the progress doesn't stop!

[TonciJukic]

Hopefully, RD2018 will record with direct presentation streaming too, instead of invisible projector from the video. or offer PPTs/PDFs. :)

[yellow]

With old software on modern technology, they are able to start up around 40 times in a second and that's with the my low-quality laptop.

[atticus]

Something I took from this language is that it is WAY too far ahead of it's time, in a great way. I don't think most even understand how smart this guy is. This is insane. These features are literally the future depending on how they are implemented. I would imagine this language won't be picked up mainstream for a long time due to the immense learning curve of some of these out of the box features. This guy has been programming industry standard C/C++ code so long he was able to take that experience and go straight from mind to program with improvements, optimizations in workflow, a whole ass new programming language, great syntax, great features, and all. This will be under appreciated at first.

[mrt_]

49:08 Hopefully soon™ (it is now 5 years and 4 months later... it is still not released)

[TranceDaNight]

Great speech, I really appreciate that he shares many ideas on the web, just like his games many of his ideas are mind blowing

[jordanfox]

Boy, it sure would be cool to see these graphs JB keeps talking about

[pohjoisenvanhus]

So in the end programming is no different from any other field of professional activity in that traditions dominate and even at the bleeding edge the research questions is shaped by the traditions people model the world through while the best ideas are discovered early which leads to an obvious increasing difficulty in finding new beneficial ideas and as an end result progress slows down due to diminishing returns on developing the tools and practices. Endless progress is a myth that obviously is not supported by the laws of reality.

[Kavukamari]

I feel like in the past incremental builds were really good because computers were slower so it was worth splitting everything up and only compiling what you need, but now it's faster to just compile everything at once and skip all the side stuff added from linking disparate parts

[plar]

This is the most underrated video on the entire Internet.