Re:Former Nvidia Dev's Thoughts on Vulkan/Mantle
by gcatlin on Friday March 13, 2015 @07:54AM
(#9196674)
Apparently, a Vulkan "Hello, world!" program takes about 600 lines of code!
Re:Former Nvidia Dev's Thoughts on Vulkan/Mantle
by FreezerburnV on Friday March 13, 2015 @08:54AM
(#9196854)
600 lines of code really isn't that much. At my day job a single file can be 2-6x that long, and there are a lot of files to deal with. Any project that gets beyond "Hey here's a neat little snippet of code that does something" will very quickly begin to dwarf those 600 lines. Also, from the original post talking about the new API and current graphics drivers, every developer is already implicitly using a couple million lines of code by using the OpenGL/DirectX APIs. They're just hidden from the developer in a closed-source binary.
Will doing things the "good but hard" way force me to write tons of boilerplate? Because as a (currently iOS) programmer, as soon as I start having to write generic, structural code, I find it difficult to sustain my interest in the project. I want to go from idea to something that works as quickly as humanly possible; having to remake the universe from scratch just because somebody somewhere needed the performance is not what I got into the game for.
(I'm currently working with OpenGL for the first time, and, ugh, all the state management stuff and shader boilerplate is driving me crazy — especially after years of the relative ease of dealing with UIKit! Am I to understand that Vulkan will only make things worse in this regard? I guess it's good for engine devs, but I would not want to code like this in my day-to-day.)