Ok fair enough. I don't write performance stuff in Java so I haven't even needed to look at this stuff to be honest. Most of the intrinsics I would want are there, except for any memory related stuff. I'm still not sure how structs are laid out in memory but I guess there's something for that too. My favourite thing in C++ is just loading a big binary blob and being able to point directly into it.
The only thing that was different was that we had a number of platform-specific intrinsics to really shake fast code out. E.g. shuffles on x86 on older SSE editions were terrible and we would have custom x86 code for shuffles or let memory out differently.
The only thing we use from C++ stdlib is unique_ptr. For everything else we had our own much more tailored, much faster, stuff. We had something like 10 different array containers for example.
Yeah what you described with templates is what we are doing re speculative optimisation. We have tuned versions for different workloads. We would inspect before we decide which one to run (only if that wasn't slower then just having one implementation, which was often the case because of instruction cache).
Something to be aware of is that on consoles mmapping a page to be executable was forbidden. So no JIT. And you aim for your slowest target so PC just follows that.
I'm a Java developer now, amongst other languages. The advantage of Java is that it takes A LOT less time to develop something, so there is the whole bang for buck for sure. I have had a few problems where I would love shared direct memory access and some atomics (because it would be a lot easier). But for the most part developing in Java is a lot quicker.
I don't think game developers are more conservative than any other developers. We do have large C++ codebases and so it's hard to change.
All modern engines have a few scripting languages tacked on too.
Something like Lua usually is the sweet spot: most of the people developing scripts are not developers. We even had a Java interpreter for scripting once, but it lost favor for this reason.
There were exceptions, but I found that developers generally preferred C# over Java anyway. Our assets pipelines are generally in C# already.
Any speculative optimisation we were doing by hand. There is the whole deferring allocations / moving allocations, both of which we were already doing (e.g. copying every frame).
A lot of our C++ code is intrinsics (including memory primitives like _mm_stream_ps and barriers) and you HAVE to have good control over how memory is laid out (e.g. knowing that data is split between cache lines so that you you don't get contention). Lots of spin locks too. I just don't see how you can do this kind of low level work in Java.
Low level CPU-related optimisation is absolutely still a thing. The GPU is always filled to the brim trying to get as much quality out of a graphics frame so a lot gets offloaded to the CPU. When I was doing this I was doing a lot of low-level CPU optimisation. GPU optimisation was usually more about transform process topology but there was plenty of low-level work to do there too.
Games are both high throughput AND low-latency and C++ is still king there
I did notice that difference too. But previous "credit card size" projects have all been several mm (as in couldn't fit a wallet designed for credit cards). So 1 mm is... pretty sweet!
I went to the page expecting to rant about how it's not actually credit card size because of the thickness and was for once pleasantly surprised! Kudos to the author! It looks great!
It's always the kitchen for me across food places (in Australia). Ending up with pickles when I removed them. Ending up with coke zero instead of coke. But the worst is ending up with anything mock meat!
It's been mixed moving to normal code: I haven't had to low-level optimise for ages now (man I miss that). But performance in the O() sense has been the same.
Game engine development is very much about processing of data. The pipeline is long and the tree is wide. Being able to reason about complicated data processing topologies mapped very easily across.
I haven't watched his videos on his language for ages, but this was a big thing he wanted in his language: being able to swap between array-of-structs and struct-of-array quickly and easily.
I've worked with a lot of code like this (particularly C libraries and litanies of return codes), and it's fine... But I prefer something like Java-style exceptions. And with Java lambdas or Kotlin the trend is unfortunately away from checked exceptions these days...
I'm the opposite - I really like checked exceptions in Java because it's very easy to see how developers are handling errors and they also form part of the function signature.
Most functions will just pass on exceptions verbatim so it's better than error return values because with them the entire codebase has to be littered with error handling, compared to fewer try catch blocks.
setjmp, etc. are like unchecked exceptions, so I'm also not a fan, but I use this occasionally in C anyway.
In context most of the major optimisation work was on the engine. The game code can be and usually is slow but we do try to tame things in an O() sense.
I worked licensed titles for a while and that area the quality of a title and whether it sells were largely uncorrelated haha!