We Are Doomed: A pessimistic point of view of "modern software engineering"

What ever you think of Vulkan, it is NOT typical of modern software engineering. Its a massive outlier. It is very demanding of its users, it is very low level, it exposes the complexity of the hardware, it is large but not bloated, as it reflects the hardware complexity.<p>If you complain that modern software is slow (it is), then its because people are NOT using low level APIs like Vulkan, that forces you to think about how to most effectively utilize the hardware. Its because people don&#x27;t want to know how anything works, and load up on a mountain of dependencies and run everything in a garbage collected virtual machine in a browser.

IMHO, the most concerning sign about software engineering practice isn&#x27;t exactly &quot;bloat&quot;, but the <i>inability of the industry to do anything securely</i>.<p>Consider every software security update to be a bridge falling down, due to incompetence.<p>In this case, the fault isn&#x27;t so much individual incompetence, as collective incompetence of the field. The ecosystem is toxic, as are conventional practices, as are market incentives. Individuals might be incompetent on top of that, but the situation is nigh impossible for competent ones as well.<p>And there are no professional engineer licenses to pull, nor few individuals to send to jail.

I respectfully disagree. I’ve passed the same thoughts back and forth in my mind before, but it’s mostly nostalgia.<p>Yes, some tools were much snappier on much crappier hardware, but they also lacked features, including safety and collaborative ones.<p>We have so many more people using computer devices and the internet now. We have to account for them to some extent and a lot of libraries do that for us, but it does make them heavier.<p>I’d say yes software has gotten fat and slow in a lot places, but also immensely more capable and more reusable.

Neither Apple nor Microsoft want any usable multiplatform graphics API. For this reason, none of them delivers such a thing.<p>If you want a multiplatform graphics API, you should use a library which implements such API on top of these native OS-specific APIs.<p>I have good experience with that one: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;diligentgraphics.com&#x2F;diligent-engine&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;diligentgraphics.com&#x2F;diligent-engine&#x2F;</a> I’ve used it couple times on Windows with D3D12 backend, and on Linux with GLES 3.1 backend.

Something similar happened back in the late 80&#x27;s when we had painful EGA and then VGA&#x2F;MCGA arrived with its glorious mode 13h, then everything about graphics became easy and cool! Then Super-VGA entered...

So the problems in article are: Apple doesn&#x27;t support Vulkan, Apple chips were incompatible with Docker, Apple deprecated OpenGL support, Apple don&#x27;t make their Metal multiplatform. I think I see a pattern here, hehe

In my arms brother<p><pre><code> I am very pissed when I see software “engineers” more concerned about a vim configuration than thinking why their shell profile takes three to four full seconds to load.</code></pre>

The answer for Apple is shockingly simple... stop buying their hardware. It sucks for games, so just stop.

The root of many successful revolutions is observing that what exists is simply unacceptable and working to build something transformatively new. Many such attempts fail, but not all of them do. Perhaps the author is identifying such a need, and might consider architecting a superior cross platform solution from first principles.

I highly doubt that building a 10 c++ files was as fast as now. I am clearly remember building c# apps for a much longer, i remember how deployment of a trivial app on Azure took ~15 minutes. Meanwhile we still don&#x27;t have 5k displays with 120hz, hardware is not even here.

Most companies aren&#x27;t like Rockstar Games or older Valve. More MBA&#x27;s pushing for product &amp; market-share grab than building from passion. IMO

Well, remember, as Donald Knuth said, “optimization is the root of all evil” (that’s what your boss heard).

&quot;Graphics programmer thinks that their field represents all of software, news at 11. In other news, systems programmers think that anyone who doesn&#x27;t want to deal with memory management is a weenie.&quot;

Missed an option for cross platform graphics, which is IMO the best one: WebGPU. Supported on all platforms, much simpler than Vulkan, and with solid C++ (Dawn) and Rust (wgpu) libraries.

I&#x27;ve been saying this for some time. This is all in line with the bullshit jobs phenomenon which is likely the result of reserve bank &#x27;full employment&#x27; agenda.<p>People used to think I was a conspiracy theorist for suggesting this. Yet it&#x27;s clear as crystal that the incentives in the monetary system itself are set up this way. Can you think of a more powerful incentive than money to drive behavior?

my opinion is that high resolution displays are the root of all evil.

Meh. Yet another unfocused rant about &quot;complexity&quot;. PC gaming is essentially dying and so there&#x27;s no money in it and no effort being put into it, and that goes triple for PC gaming on Apple systems. Stuff gets faster when you pay skilled people to make it faster, and gets slower when you don&#x27;t care how fast it is. That&#x27;s all it&#x27;s ever been.