I think I’ve never heard someone romanticize a profession as hard as what you’ve done here. This comment paints a truly distorted and unrealistic picture of game developers.
Game developers are not radically different from other developers. You see game developers leave the game industry and become programmers somewhere else, or you see programmers in another industry become programmers in the game industry. It is not a big deal.
While you could find some game developers who care about saving a couple bytes to fit something in a single network packet, you can equally find developers elsewhere who care about the same thing. Shave some time off your latency numbers and people stay on your website or app, they buy things or watch ads, your company gets money, you put it in your performance review. That’s just the most boring example I could think of. There are more interesting examples. Most programmers are simply not interested in saving a few bytes or a few cycles because they have features to work on. That includes game developers.
We fetishize low-level programming too much. Low-level programming is, in a sense, easy, because you are working with components that are simpler and have better documentation.
never in my 30-year career have I witnessed a single non-game developer give a damn about the latency or responsiveness of any application they've written.
never in my 30-year career have I witnessed a single game or emulator developer STOP caring about these things.
> I think I’ve never heard someone romanticize a profession as hard as what you’ve done here.
Go fuck yourself. it isn't me romanticizing, it's you thinking you know more than others by default, and outright dismissing the viewpoint of others. go away from me and stay away.
I work in telecoms, we do care a lot about latency, HFT guys are the same.
Some parts use FPGAs instead of normal hardware due to the low latency requirements!
OTOH I remember when one man doubled the framerate of a Nintendo game: apparently not all game developers care so much if they leave so much performance unused..
Game developers are not radically different from other developers. You see game developers leave the game industry and become programmers somewhere else, or you see programmers in another industry become programmers in the game industry. It is not a big deal.
While you could find some game developers who care about saving a couple bytes to fit something in a single network packet, you can equally find developers elsewhere who care about the same thing. Shave some time off your latency numbers and people stay on your website or app, they buy things or watch ads, your company gets money, you put it in your performance review. That’s just the most boring example I could think of. There are more interesting examples. Most programmers are simply not interested in saving a few bytes or a few cycles because they have features to work on. That includes game developers.
We fetishize low-level programming too much. Low-level programming is, in a sense, easy, because you are working with components that are simpler and have better documentation.