The Vanishing Of Ashlar: 4kb demo using GPU for sound and pathtracing

Re:The Vanishing Of Ashlar: 4kb demo using GPU for sound and... by jacquesm on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @09:42AM (#23310979)

These demos are some of the last arenas in software development where real skills can be displayed. Elsewhere it's mostly shuttling data from one field to another with some business logic, API glue and other cruft and to hell with the RAM footprint. Awesome stuff, thank you for posting.

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Re:The Vanishing Of Ashlar: 4kb demo using GPU for sound and... by NelsonMinar on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @10:09AM (#23311300)

I agree that demos like this are a wonder of "real skill". But it's bizarre to assert it's the only place it's possible. Yes, most software development is boring business stuff built on unstable towers of boring frameworks and infrastructure.

But there's plenty of room for art in your code. Either straight out art like this; generative computer art is a very exciting aesthetic area. Or just building elegant systems. There's no reason a network caching layer or a machine learning library can't be beautiful and skillful the same way a demo is. (The one exception is terseness; the tricks necessary to shoehorn a beautiful demo into 4k often make code unmaintainable.)

Aesthetics matter.

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Re:The Vanishing Of Ashlar: 4kb demo using GPU for sound and... by sp332 on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @10:16AM (#23311395)

jaquesm said it's where skills can be "displayed". I think the latest update I made to a CRUD app is pretty slick, but I can't really show it off.

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Re:The Vanishing Of Ashlar: 4kb demo using GPU for sound and... by fenwick67 on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @10:34AM (#23311622)

IMO there are still a lot of interesting problems being solved in gamedev, particularly in 3d rendering but also in defining game logic (3d follow-camera systems are particularly complex).

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