[overgard]

A few thoughts:

* None of the problems that have been commented on are unique to the games industry at all. Slow debug builds suck for all C++ developers and weird template meta-programming is confusing for practically everyone.

* He makes these broad hand-wavey statements like "individuals don't feel pain from slow compile times", or "big companies can just can throw processor power at it" to which I would say, BS. Fast iteration in C++ is really hard because of the delay and it's a big problem for everyone.

* "Participate more" -- isn't that exactly what people are doing on twitter? Not everyone can go to CppCon.

[mattnewport]

I think slow debug performance is a bigger problem for games than many other applications. It's annoying for everyone but the nature of games as interactive experiences means you often have to play a game to reproduce a bug easily and often with a full production level where the bug was reported, not with simpler test content. If you can't maintain a playable frame rate in debug builds this can be a problem.

This problem was worst in my experience in the Xbox 360 / PS3 generation because the in order processors handled debug builds very poorly and were different enough from a PC that it was common to have to debug on target rather than on a PC build on a much more powerful development machine. It's less of an issue with current generation consoles that are basically PCs as they don't suffer as badly with debug performance and many issues can be debugged on a PC build on a more powerful system. It may be more of an issue for mobile still.

Fortunately many of the newer features of C++ 17 and 20 help both with improving debug performance and with simplifying / reducing the need for "weird template meta-programming". Several also help with compile times and modules in particular are quite focused on tackling the biggest root cause of slow compiles in C++.

[andrewmcwatters]

My question is, where are all these "big companies" who can throw more processor power at these problems? Because frankly, every major company I've been at uses the same commodity or cloud hardware everyone else does, so I just don't see it. It's a moot point.

Rarely do I see workstation-grade hardware in the wild, and when I have, they're build slaves that are incredibly anti-agile.

[mattnewport]

EA I know gives developers very powerful workstation class developer machines because I used to work there and have friends who still do and if anything it sounds like they've got even more powerful on a relative basis since I left.