Re: Software Architecture/Design

On Jun 10, 2010, at 11:27 PM, Shaun Stamper wrote:

> 
>> And here you just made his argument for him.  The original point was that the industry has long since moved on from an ASM-first approach to game development -- it's now very much the *exception* rather than the *rule*
> You seem to have missed the point:
> Yes, but ASM lost, and eventually C++ will lose too.  Eventually
> computers become fast enough that the typical performance spikes
> aren't important anymore.
> Brandon saying that performance of code will become a non issue. 
> 
> Its always going to be an issue, until we have quantum computers. What i'm arguing is that no matter what you do, if you hit a limit where the language itself is the performance barrier, you *have to dig deeper* nothing more.

ASM did "lose" in that it's not something the majority of coders have to worry about anymore.  99% of programmer man-hours don't get spent on ASM.  ASM could be used to do all the things being done in C++, C#, Lua, etc today -- and doing so would probably net performance gains of 10x or more, but that's irrelevant to most game shops because getting "more" out of the coder man-hours available is a higher priority than getting the most out of every available cycle.

My game studio doesn't have to worry about ASM because the tools it uses magic it away for us (rather, they apply it where needed and give me an interface that does what I need with adequate performance).  Much like how you use C++ compilers that magic it away for you, for the most part.  The difference is that I'm mostly working in a domain that's less tightly constrained hardware-wise so I can go further along that trend of "performance doesn't matter" than you can.  A couple more generations of hardware down the line, I'll still be further along the spectrum than you, but you'll be where I sit today.

-JF

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