Back in the late-90s/early 2000s boom it was not a secret that enterprise corps pushed universities to teach Java because they wanted easily-replaceable widget engineers engineering easily-replaceable widgets.
On the opposite side, startups building on difficult languages like Haskell, Elixir, Erlang have a built-in bias towards hiring a team that can get a lot more done with a lot less people. Great for startups. Terrible for enterprise.
Old 3D engine guy here. I highly encourage folks to make a 3D engine for fun and learning. Shipping a game with it would be a cherry on top. Come join us in r/graphicsprograming, r/gameenginedevs and the graphics programming discord.
But, if you made a mesh you wouldn’t be able to represent fuzzy objects. That’s one of the major advantages of both splats and this printing technique.
The original paper that kicked off the movement a few years ago used Gaussian blobs because gaussians are differentiable and the tech to analyze a scene requires the tech used for rendering to be differentiable.
I always liked the advice "Abstract for replacement. Not for reuse."
If you have code that is reusable, you'll want it to have a nice interface. But, you don't need an abstraction on top of a nice interface. Just use it.
For abstraction, what you need to focus on is "What is most likely to change in the future?" You want to put in abstractions that will make those changes low-cost.
Ex: At work there was a small debate about which C++ JSON parser to use with no stand-out winner for our framework's needs. So, we picked one and I put a thin layer over it for everyone to use. We have since then swapped out the parser and swapped it back over the years of a hundred devs using it in our framework and no one noticed the swaps.
> The operation is finished when the progress float reaches 1.0 and isDone is called. If you set allowSceneActivation to false, progress is halted at 0.9 until it is set to true.
So, I needed to have my UI do other stuff until both this and something else was ready. Obvious thing to do would be to check this for "AsyncOperation.progress >= 0.9" and also check the other thing. Right?
Except AsyncOperation.progress is a float, 0.9 is a double and 0.9f < 0.9. Progress is not halted at 0.9. It never reaches 0.9. It's halted at 0.9f! Just a few million ulps short!
If you want to play with software rendering, here's probably the shortest code that will get an ARGB8888 2D array from main memory to the screen efficiently for all platforms using SDL2 in C https://gist.github.com/CoryBloyd/6725bb78323bb1157ff8d4175d... you'll need to do the translation from a 320x200x8-bit palletized framebuffer to ARGB yourself ;)
Then there’s the opposite situation. I knew the guys who ported NBA Jam: TE from arcade to PC (by hand-translating assembly!). Apparently the arcade CPU had bitwise addressing. And, because pretty much all of the data was aligned to bytes, the arcade programmers liked to stuff 3 bits of extra parameter data into the low bits of pointers.
The People: Hey local government! The roads are so packed with cars they are useless. Fix it!
The Government: We hear you and just finished a huge road expansion project. The roads now have 2x the capacity! Enjoy the new fast roads!
The People: The roads are just as slow as before because they are packed with 2X as many cars now!
So, the paradox is that greatly increasing the capacity of the roads led to the roads being just as slow as before. Maybe even slower. This is because there previously were lots of potential uses of the roads that people did not enact because it would not have been worth the hassle. But, now with 2X the capacity, those uses become viable. So, more people find more uses of the roads up until it gets right back to the limit of everyone patience.
Apply this to coding and you can predict: Coding is much faster and easier now. So, why are all my coders still so busy?
"Approved for Exams" make more sense when you take into account the history of the Ti family of calculators.
Why are they still able to sell what is effectively a 30 year old computer for as much or more today than when it came out? Because they managed to get the family informally standardized as "The calculator every teacher in America understands well enough to manage students who use it. Therefore pretty much everything else that could be as or more advanced is effect banned."
It was an amazing piece of kit when it first came out. No doubt you could make something 100x better and 10x cheaper today if someone really tried. But, they would fail commercially because you can't design-in 30 years of legacy in the US school system.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f90R2taD1WQ