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 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> 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 an hour 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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duped an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't really like this line of discourse because few domains are as ignorant of computing advances as game development. Which makes sense, they have real deadlines and different goals. But I often roll my eyes at some of the conference talks and twitter flame wars that come from game devs, because the rest of computing has more money resting on performance than most game companies will ever make in sales. Not to mention, we have to design things that don't crash.

It seems like much of the shade is tossed at web front end like it's the only other domain of computing besides game end.

	▲	dijit 38 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I mean... fair point? I'm not claiming games are uniquely performance-critical. You're right that HFT, large-scale backend, and real-time systems care deeply about performance, often with far more money at stake. But those domains are rare. The vast majority of software development today can genuinely throw hardware or money at problems (even HFT and large backend systems). Backends are usually designed to scale horizontally, data science rents bigger GPUs, embedded gets more powerful SoCs every year. Most developers never have to think about cache lines because their users have fast machines and tolerant expectations. Games are one of the few consumer-facing domains that can't do this. We can't mandate hardware (and attempts at doing so cost sales and attract community disgust), we can't hide latency behind async, and our users immediately notice a 5ms hitch. That creates different pressures- we're optimising for the worst case on hardware we don't control whilst most of the industry optimises for the common case on hardware they choose. You're absolutely right that we're often ignorant of advances elsewhere. But the economic constraint is real, and it's increasingly unusual.