[qwery]

~ "it's not a TUI! <describes an outrageously overengineered TUI> and my dad works at Nintendo"

curses, bud. curses.

It's genuinely difficult to tell how much of this is true. The post is obviously 100% posturing, but some of the words describe things that could be done.

Very few game engines do anything I'd describe as rasterisation. That's kind of the point of a GPU. Well, it used to be. I suppose "small game engines" might be more likely on average to include a rasteriser. The typical reason for this is because the author wanted to write it. Whereas big engine make triangle give hardware go brrr.

So I assume here 'rasterize' means 'printf'. And diffing screens means diffing 50..150 lines of text. And "generating ANSI sequences to draw" means 'printf' with some ANSI sequences interpolated in.

Then there's the frame budget. You have to understand they are operating within a strict frame budget -- they're not messing around, OK. They have a 16 ms frame budget, so they burned 11 ms and now have a (roughly) ~5 ms approx. budget for the final 'printf' in the chain???

[fc417fc802]

Your broader point is well taken but I thought I'd stop by with some trivia. High end engines such as unreal will rasterize absurd quantities of micro-geometry manually using compute shaders in order to avoid the bottleneck of the hardware rasterizer.

[solid_fuel]

> High end engines such as unreal

High end engines such as unreal have the excuse of being tasked with rendering millions of polygons, in which case a complex approach makes sense. Claude Code is only being asked to render a few thousand UTF-8 characters.

[fc417fc802]

Hence my prominent note that it was trivia which implies it to be at least somewhat tangential to the original conversation.