Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by otterley 4307 days ago
> Game programmers figured out the same and arguably better ways of doing this since each version of std::vector has been released. This is but a small reason most of us had in-house stl libraries for decades now.

OTOH, game programmers don't share this kind of knowledge on public fora as freely as Internet companies do. It may be "old news" to you, but it was unpublished. Knowledge is great, but dissemination is even better.

2 comments

Actually, game companies as well as various indie developers have widely distributed this knowledge. Some examples of places to look/things to search for implementations or similar/better:

-GDC Slide Decks -Game Programming Data Structure/Performance Books -Game Industry Publications - ex: Game Programming Gems -EA STL -Game Dev Sites -Any available source to various engines/games in the last many years should have more than a few inside

Moreover, this is also a common thing in a lot of embedded and high-performance development in general.

Just because someone didn't make a github project and post it on HN doesn't mean it doesn't exist. This seems to be a trend with web developers - reinventing what exists without properly checking what is there, and doing so usually poorly. I say this as someone who has done game development and web development at various points of my career (currently web by day, game by night) so I am not trying to be condescending, just pointing out an unfortunate trend.

Downvote if you want, but I see the first game dev who replied already confirmed what I said.

I agree that there are other public fora than company-sponsored blog posts, but I don't see your industry contributing its accumulated knowledge back to the library developers, either (assuming you're relying on open-source C++ libraries).

If this truly was a well-known issue long ago, it should also have been fixed long ago by game developers contributing back to the open-source developers who have made their work possible so that the rest of us didn't have to rediscover these performance issues.

If you want to avoid this kind of criticism, be a part of the solution outside your own industry walls; don't just brag post hoc about how you solved it in your castle for yourselves.

I went and actually checked the first 6 links in this search, and none of them really address the problems brought up in the OP. If you're going to be arrogant about this issue, you should at least be correct.
EA open sourced parts of their in-house STL. A Github clone can be found at:

https://github.com/paulhodge/EASTL

I haven't looked at it myself but it might be an interesting start for those interested.