It's like the common claim that data-oriented programming came out of game development. It's ahistorical, but a common belief. People can't see past their heroes (Casey Muratori, Jonathon Blow) or the past decade or two of work.

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dijit an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I partly agree, but I think you're overcorrecting. Game developers didn't invent data-oriented design or performance-first thinking. But there's a reason the loudest voices advocating for them in the 2020s come from games: we work in one of the few domains where you literally cannot ship if you ignore cache lines and data layout. Our users notice a 5ms frame hitch- While web developers can add another React wrapper and still ship.

Computing left game development behind. Whilst the rest of the industry built shared abstractions, we worked in isolation with closed tooling. We stayed close to the metal because there was nothing else.

When Casey and Jon advocate for these principles, they're reintroducing ideas the broader industry genuinely forgot, because for two decades those ideas weren't economically necessary elsewhere. We didn't preserve sacred knowledge. We just never had the luxury of forgetting performance mattered, whilst the rest of computing spent 20 years learning it didn't.

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Jtsummers an hour ago | parent [-]

> I think you're overcorrecting.

I don't understand this part of your comment, it seems like you're replying to some other comment or something not in my comment. How am I overcorrecting? A statement of fact, that game developers didn't invent these things even though that's a common belief, is not an overcorrection. It's just a correction.

	▲	dijit 17 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Ah, I read your comment as "game devs get too much credit for this stuff and people are glorifying Casey and Jon" and ran with that, but you were just correcting the historical record. My bad. I think we're aligned on the history; I was making a point about why they're prominent advocates today (and why people are attributing invention to them) even though they didn't invent the concepts.

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moregrist 27 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

It clearly didn’t come out of game dev. Many people doing high performance work on either embedded or “big silicon” (amd64) in that era were fully aware of the importance of locality, branch prediction, etc

But game dev, in particular Mike Acton, did an amazing job of making it more broadly known. His CppCon talk from 2014 [0] is IMO one of the most digestible ways to start thinking about performance in high throughput systems.

In terms of heroes, I’d place Mike Acton, Fabian Giesen [1], and Bruce Dawson [2] at the top of the list. All solid performance-oriented people who’ve taken real time to explain how they think and how you can think that way as well.

I miss being able to listen in on gamedev Twitter circa 2013 before all hell broke loose.

[0] https://youtu.be/rX0ItVEVjHc?si=v8QJfAl9dPjeL6BI

[1] https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/

[2] https://randomascii.wordpress.com/