John Carmack Goes On Coding Retreat With OpenBSD

While id Software founder John Carmack has been known for his open-source and Linux interests over the years and even working on Utah GLX back in the day, he just wrapped up a self-driven "programming retreat" where he was using OpenBSD.

These days Carmack is mostly accustomed to using Windows and Visual Studio, but decided to take a week long holiday where he was experimenting with C++ neural network implementations and doing all of his work strictly from a base OpenBSD operating system.

He was developing within Vi and debugging using GDB. One of the issues he notes with OpenBSD is its poor support for C++ due to the older GCC found on OpenBSD in the base system not having C++11 support and the LLVM C++ support not working well with GDB. He was sticking to using an OpenBSD base system so didn't appear to try LLDB nor did he go for the more recent Clang or GCC packages available as alternatives to the base compiler.

Those wanting to hear more about John's OpenBSD and programming thoughts, he shared a recap of his programming retreat via his Facebook page.