SUBSCRIBE| <<prev 2009-09-29 next>> I have recently been away on vacation in North Carolina for my highschool reunion and have taken quite a trip down memory lane since I haven't been back to see the area in 10 years. I got to visit my old house and some old memories got triggered. It made me start thinking about what I thought the best years were for me programming. I've been programming games since the age of 11 (1992) and have seen a lot of changes to environments, languages, software and technology in my time. Looking back I think the best time for programming games (for me at least) was about 1996-1997. Windows 95 had come out not too long ago and I was relatively new to C++. Using my trusty Borland compiler I could still access right down to the hardware and use pure assembly but also take use of nifty Windows UI features. And when ASM ran, it actually just ran! There wasn't safety checks and OS interrupts to screw up the timing etc. Those were the days I wrote my first games that utilized XMS memory and SVGA... and I discovered the mystical pseudo function __emit__ which allowed me to hardcode raw bytecode in C. When you talked to people about the Internet, nobody knew what you were talking about except your computer nerd friends who were migrating with you from the BBSes to Netscape Navigator. In those days there were some 3D games on the market, namely Quake but gamers weren't obsessed with them or only buying games because of the fancy graphics yet. The Saturn and Playstation were vieing for the lead console and of course everyone knew the Saturn had better hardware but the Playstation had more games. Being a big Sega fan I had a Saturn and played Guardian Heroes to my heart's content :) I miss those days... These days no matter how hard you try, getting access to any hardware in code is straight up impossible. It's like the OS designers put all the programmers into straight jackets for fear of what they might do. And the solace for computer 1337 has all but disappeared; sacrificed to make way for the masses. The pinnacle of this frenzy appears to be in Flash where programmers are locked in 10 layers of ill-fitting straight jackets and thrown to the masses to be devoured by 12 year old kids. Adobe, just give me my DPMI! |
First ASM program was 27 printed pages but all of 4k in size when compiled. Ran fast, was pretty for what it was worth and was a heck of a lot of fun.
Now a Java program that does just some string parsing is just as long and does nothing fun.
I miss those days
Some things that were hard are now easy and also things which were easy are now hard.
Java has had just in time compiler support since 1997. It is no longer interpreted at run time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_programming#Performance
I'm aware of JIT compilation and I have used J2SE and J2ME as well as C++ and BREW extensively in my career. It has been my experience that the JIT doesn't always work right (I'm not sure if it even works at all on mobile) or compile to anywhere near optimal instructions especially on ARM processors. Of course now there are interesting hybrid systems on mobile which utilize a BREW core and put J2ME ontop of it so you can use either but that's another story.
Sincerely,
Someone