[dakom]

Anecdotal evidence - I cut my teeth on C and a dabble of asm as a kid (even writing z80 opcodes directly for fun!). I vaguely remember wrangling bits to drive logic. I also wrote webpages as Apache C modules with binary logic to parse requests :D

That was a long time ago in tech terms (~15 years). In the intervening gap I spent most of my time in scripted languages (as3, c#, etc.).

Result? I don't know how to wrangle bits anymore. The added speed increase I'd add almost definitely isn't worth it (for example, flash and unity games, web services, etc.). That doesn't mean it isn't worth it for the end product - I rely on Unity, Adobe, Google, etc. to worry about those optimizations so I can stand on their shoulders and benefit.

But in terms of cost/benefit, getting into that stuff myself (again) just didn't make sense for most of my professional needs.

[ksk]

>I rely on Unity, Adobe, Google, etc. to worry about those optimizations so I can stand on their shoulders and benefit.

It seems to me like they might be doing the same thing! For all the supposedly smart people they hire, TBH I can't think of a single product that feels fast/performant to me.

[dakom]

Ultimately that's a subjective call. If I had to write the Unity Editor and enable it to hit the targets they do - man I don't even know where to start. Seems like voodoo to me, personally I'm extremely impressed but I admit it might just be my lack of knowledge of what's possible now (last time I did low-level graphics stuff was amateur mucking around with mode 13h and SDL)