John Carmack Goes On Coding Retreat With OpenBSD

[cl333r]

If it wasn't Carmack one would say it's a poor choice by an unexperienced dev to use an underdeveloped OS with a shitty old stack for such a sophisticated purpose.

[mmstick]

Also you completedly ignored his main complaint with Linux... it isn't cohesive like at all.

Sounds a little absurd, if you ask me.

[grok]

I don't think he's complaining, just constating, letting us know. He saw something about Textronic terminals too, I guess this was man page about xterm. Even on linux, if you have xterm installed there's a vector graphics system buried in it!
What's out of retro character is writing this on fakebook instead of a web 1.0 blog.

OpenBSD is having a focus on security, not on recent software and modern fancy bells and whistles.

So, no upgrades every five seconds, and docs on the hard drive. It's interesting to be able to function without the Internet. It's like old days when things used to come with a manual

[rene]

As was written, in a lot of parts, yes.
There is a minimum speed, there is a "recommended" speed range and there are a lot of no limit zones, of the road permits (multi lane, relatively straight, smooth surface, no dangerous parts or branchings).
You can go there as fast as your car can. (Though iirc. above 250 km/h you need a racing license.)
But it hardly makes sense cause most cars won't go that fast, it's a fuel waste, it's highly stressing, dangerous and in most parts the traffic is either too dense anyway or there are lots of construction sites and speed is limited to 80 ... 120 km/h.

there is no such thing as "racing license" for German streets, however, we actually have real driving school, some 20 or so theoretical hours, plus a similar amount of practical driving, and real, theoretical test plus usually 45 minutes+ practical examination. The German driving license usually cost around 2000 EUR, if you pass the first time, which quite some do not. Btw. foreigners who do not know how to drive are really annoying on the German Autobahn, especially if they do not drive rightmost, ... :-/

[M@yeulC]

I enjoyed his blog post, which despite being on Facebook -- which now owns Oculus, of which John Carmack is now an employee -- isn't behind a login wall (the only thing I can say is that Firefox's reading mode puts the text in bold, on my phone at least).

Go read it if you want, it is quite short, and just happens to mention openBSD in passing, with a few anecdotal technical takeaways.

[kpedersen]

Thought this old .plan file of his might be relevant here:

http://rmitz.org/carmack.on.operating.systems.html

A repo of them can be found here: -> https://github.com/oliverbenns/john-carmack-plan

Carmack is not new to trying out different operating systems to fit his purpose. Though I may not agree with his preference of Windows and Visual Studio, I respect that he is one of the only game developers I know that did not blindly follow the obsessive Wintel and DirectX bandwagon (which is *finally* dying out after 20+ painful years).

[AndyChow]

Is that him complaining about the "unix-ish" world by shooting himself in the foot? If you want to hack away, you use some generic Linux, maybe even Gentoo. There you got all sorts of toolchains, recent compilers with support for everything (also C++14 and whatnot), you got languages, IDEs, editors and many more things.
OpenBSD is having a focus on security, not on recent software and modern fancy bells and whistles.

This is like I'd buy a 50 year old truck and complain that it goes so slow on the Autobahn (Autobahn = Germany speed highway auomatically including Autobahn-wide warzone )

Well, he could have just installed gcc6 which is available in the packages, or gone into /usr/ports/lang/gcc/6 and typed "make install clean", and have C++14 and all that.

If he would have gone with Gentoo, he would have finished his weekend retreat and almost finished compiling GCC.

[M@GOid]

I actually read his post and to me it was just a thing he like to do, like, isolate himself from work, took on a new (to him) OS and do some learning on a field he is not very aquatinted. For computer nerds like him is a fun thing to do, nothing too serious. He is not trying to convert people on using some computer stuff, he was just telling about a experience he had on a "vacation week".

[starshipeleven]

Also you completedly ignored his main complaint with Linux... it isn't cohesive like at all.

That's a matter of perspective.

As long as he uses a single distro he gets the exact same results as if he was using windows (same/consistent environment for his program).

When it comes to porting software between distros then it is massively easier than porting software between other OSes (like from windows to MacOS).

[starshipeleven]

If it wasn't Carmack one would say it's a poor choice by an unexperienced dev to use an underdeveloped OS with a shitty old stack for such a sophisticated purpose.

It's still a poor choice to use an underdeveloped OS with a shitty old stack for such a sophisticated purpose though.