Threadwell

Recent Notes

DemetriSpanos
Oct 06, 2026
NOTimothyLottes
Oct 06, 2026
bonzajplc
Oct 06, 2026

sebaaltonen

220 items with this tag.

Sep 05, 2026
SebAaltonen
Sep 03, 2026
57 lines in polished Vulkan Triangle on my minimal API.
Aug 26, 2026
This was my last day at HypeHype.
Aug 08, 2026
Extended (2x) version of my SIGGRAPH 2026 talk:
Dec 16, 2025
My "No Graphics API" blog post is live! Please repost :)
Mar 28, 2025
Indoor scenes in HypeHype are starting to look acceptable.
Mar 08, 2025
Stupid hardware question: Why does AMD use several counters instead of one u64 bitmask for memory ops?
Jan 19, 2025
Retained mode == cache data ahead of time.
Dec 18, 2024
Fixed all our Vulkan bugs:
Dec 09, 2024
Bug report: I want to scale an object to be flat.
May 03, 2024
Why should one be able to code without autocomplete and without a good IDE? I want to click on a symbol to find where it's defined and click on include file to go there, etc.
Apr 04, 2024
This is how slow code feels like:
Sep 03, 2023
Somebody asked why you can't return arrays (dynamic sized data) in C.
Jan 06, 2023
Thread: A simple explanation why AMDs 144MB 3D cache makes games run significantly faster.
Nov 22, 2022
I've long time talked about killing the graphics API.
Aug 03, 2022
Tip of the day: If you don't have the passion to build and the resources to maintain high quality tools for artists, level designers and game developers, don't build your own engine.
Apr 13, 2022
Software should be composable.
Nov 12, 2020
Most people missed this presentation by @LottesTimothy in GDC 2019:
Oct 31, 2020
This is how you generate a cube in vertex shader.
Oct 25, 2020
Implemented a simple linear estimator for distance field value.
May 05, 2019
This is how you write a good x64 spinlock: Use two stage construct.
Jan 01, 2019
Now that people have already said highly controversial stuff like ”debugger is useless for C++ development”, I think I can share my own controversial thoughts about unit testing, DRY, copy-paste coding and function length, etc...
Dec 29, 2018
I wish I was as productive blogger as @aras_p.
Nov 13, 2017
@kingsamj @EricLengyel Documented ownership is one of the main advantages of unique_ptr over raw ptr.
Aug 27, 2026
@SebAaltonen Also weird pitch but if you managed to get your API as a replacement RenderServer in godot it would likely get broad adoption.
Aug 13, 2026
@SebAaltonen I just wanted to comment on this since it popped up on my YouTube feed, and I've watched the whole talk.
Aug 12, 2026
@SebAaltonen Excellent info.
Aug 09, 2026
@SebAaltonen the honest answer is that most people in the industry don't actually care about reducing api complexity, they care about making their own code work faster and get out a demo before their investors lose patience again
Aug 09, 2026
@SebAaltonen hardly can hear anything.
Aug 08, 2026
@SebAaltonen Very nice.
Aug 08, 2026
@SebAaltonen What do you think are the chances—any chances at all—that, say, the Vulkan 2.0 API would look the way you're suggesting?
Aug 08, 2026
@SebAaltonen What assumption from existing APIs proved hardest to drop in the clean slate design?
Aug 08, 2026
@SebAaltonen Nice! I liked the history lesson at the beginning.
Aug 08, 2026
@SebAaltonen So...
Aug 08, 2026
@SebAaltonen ok but the 2x extension points toward the part nobody talks about: tooling.
May 26, 2026
@SebAaltonen Found a small typo 🙂
May 22, 2026
@SebAaltonen Great article, I remember reading it a while back when it was frontpaged on HN.
Feb 05, 2026
@SebAaltonen why does every hard core programming blog/book have some coldish scenery as a banner/cover? like, no exceptions
Dec 30, 2025
@SebAaltonen What'd be really cool is to have a translation layer to Vulkan so the API could be picked up and used today - it looks a lot less painful to start a new project in than pure Vulkan
Dec 30, 2025
@SebAaltonen I notice that your proposed minimal API makes use of PCIe ReBAR.
Dec 28, 2025
@SebAaltonen I think this part sounds self-contradictory:
Dec 27, 2025
Hey Sebastian, big fan of your work.
Dec 27, 2025
@SebAaltonen Great work! This kind of knowledge is not exposed by the existing APIs.
Dec 20, 2025
@SebAaltonen Really interesting stuff!
Dec 18, 2025
@SebAaltonen "less API" is not a good thing per se.
Dec 18, 2025
@SebAaltonen Did you update your article? There was a section where you mentioned your history and who you are, and now it's not there.
Dec 18, 2025
@SebAaltonen Hey, great post.
Dec 18, 2025
About this part:
Dec 17, 2025
@SebAaltonen Very nice! How big do you think the WebGL header would be? Just for completeness' sake, e.g.
Dec 17, 2025
@SebAaltonen One thought that came to my mind, would it be preferable to have something akin to virtual alloc vs malloc for gpus? Its not a huge difference, but it does open up some opportunities (easy arenas, sparse buffers, extra mapped ring buffers, etc)?
Dec 17, 2025
@SebAaltonen This was a great post! I agree with almost everything you wrote.
Dec 17, 2025
@SebAaltonen Read it in one gom I even understood some of it!
Dec 17, 2025
@SebAaltonen “As the heap management in Metal is automatic, users can’t allocate texture descriptors in contiguous ranges.”
Dec 17, 2025
@SebAaltonen I notice one missing topic here: the issue of frame presentation (e.g., "v-sync", screen tearing, double and triple buffering, frame pacing, etc.) In this sense, for example, Vulkan just specified VK_EXT_present_timing earlier this month.
Dec 17, 2025
@SebAaltonen Very disappointing to see some of the shallow discourse so far! It is a very thorough blog article but many of the comments are irrelevant and headline oriented
Dec 17, 2025
@SebAaltonen a minimal api like this feels like it'd be fun to use in smaller projects, what's the current closest thing to something like this that's usable now?
Dec 17, 2025
@SebAaltonen Hi, great article! For someone who knows gpu from hpc/simulation/academic work, what graphics API would you suggest as a starting point?
Dec 17, 2025
@SebAaltonen Thank you! Awesome post.
Dec 17, 2025
Re: we should keep using index buffers and indexed vertices
Dec 16, 2025
@SebAaltonen Make it happen! What shader format are you thinking? Spir-V? I like that in OpenGL i can easily write a tool that generates shaders without the need to be dependent on a compiler library to use it, but i would assume that time has passed.
Dec 16, 2025
@SebAaltonen Finally!
Dec 16, 2025
@SebAaltonen from what I've been able to find from public info, many APIs (e.g.
Dec 16, 2025
@SebAaltonen It's been a great read.
Dec 16, 2025
@SebAaltonen Minor nitpick: The trick of packing depth and color into a 64-bit integer and using an atomicMin to emulate the depth test had already been used in 2014 by @pixeljetstream one year before Dreams and a long time before Nanite 😉
Dec 16, 2025
@SebAaltonen Congrats on getting this out in the world! I can only imagine the relief to finally have all of these thoughts out of your head and consumable for others
Dec 16, 2025
@SebAaltonen A shoutout to NV_shader_buffer_load which already enabled buffer device address with c-pointer syntax in GLSL and OpenGL in, I think, 2010.
Mar 28, 2025
@SebAaltonen Any tips or existing solutions on achieving something similar in Unity? (in terms of indoor lighting)
Mar 08, 2025
@SebAaltonen Actually this is a super important question IMO.
May 05, 2024
@SebAaltonen It could be a good idea to start without intellisense.
May 05, 2024
@SebAaltonen It’s about leveraging the tools to be as productive as possible.
May 04, 2024
@SebAaltonen I think people should be able to code without tools, but I'm not going to try to take the tools away.
May 04, 2024
@SebAaltonen There is an argument where people build systems as complex and resource intensive as their tooling will allow.
May 04, 2024
@SebAaltonen I guess this is just another expression of the "if I had to suffer, you should too.
May 04, 2024
@SebAaltonen It’s gatekeeping really.
May 04, 2024
@SebAaltonen Honestly a lot of the "framework" and "transpiler" idiocy is what makes you reliant on tooling you don't need.
May 04, 2024
@SebAaltonen Sometimes we are limited by our environment, which may limit us to the tools available on the device we are working on.
May 04, 2024
@SebAaltonen Its not like you should only code without Support, but its nice to be able to.
May 04, 2024
@SebAaltonen Why do they teach arithmetic, we all have calculators
May 04, 2024
@SebAaltonen Not Notepad, but I have done a non-zero amount of programming in source control diff tools that have none of those features.
May 04, 2024
@SebAaltonen People will justify programming C/C++ on Linux.
May 04, 2024
@SebAaltonen If you can’t code TCL using VI through a bash terminal on a remote Unix box with CVS SC, you can’t code.
May 04, 2024
@SebAaltonen I would say, you should code in a way that is readable even in notepad.
May 04, 2024
@SebAaltonen The skill issue is strong with this one
May 04, 2024
@SebAaltonen I learn to code in C++ back in 2011 and my teacher advised us to work for the moment in Notepad++ just to LEARN,for example,I remember when a function receives a pointer to try to call it placing a lot of '*' or '&' and wait for intellisense not to complain about what i'd written
May 04, 2024
@SebAaltonen And when there is no tool for something, they develop it.
May 04, 2024
@SebAaltonen You never know when a time machine will transport you back into the early 90s and you have to live there and earn a living as software developer.
May 04, 2024
@SebAaltonen It's about gatekeeping and feeling superior, Sebastian.
May 04, 2024
@SebAaltonen ctags and cscope.
May 04, 2024
@SebAaltonen Why one would waste time & do things in more error prone ways, when good tools are available.
May 04, 2024
@SebAaltonen Legends use nano or vim as well!
May 04, 2024
@SebAaltonen Using CodeBlocks instead of Visual Studio for some time taught me that we created IntelliSense for a reason.
May 04, 2024
@SebAaltonen I know a lot of “professionals” who can’t code at all without an IDE, even on small projects.
May 04, 2024
@SebAaltonen You should be able to program on paper!
May 04, 2024
@SebAaltonen Ah yes, high school memories where we all wrote HTML code in Notepad.
May 04, 2024
@SebAaltonen If you wouldn't be able to do your job without an IDE there's a problem
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen Who cares? Do what makes you happiest and wealthiest.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen I wish visual studio had better code context colorization.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen Static/globals/#defines were warm
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen The only good faith reply is if you’re a systems engineer and you have to work on remote servers with no ability to run an IDE/Desktop so you’re stuck with VIM (can’t reverse tunnel/mount)
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen Nothing wrong with new tools, it's just that most people get used to them and can never go back.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen Same reason some large corps demand that we have specific paths for random shit we all use autocomplete for.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen You should write your code on paper by hand 😤 totally
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen Being able to code without assistant is a good thing, maybe?
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen Still remember how my technical school assigned a literal psychopath to teach us do databases.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen because high arrogance + low intelligence
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen Can't stand IDEs, honestly.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen I pretty much agree with you, but I started using nvim recently, and it doesn't have an LSP for the a language that I already know very well (gml) And I did learn stuff forgoing the autocomplete, I feel like my knowledge deepened, if that makes sense.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen To flex on others
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen I remember having an argument with one of the staffs of 42 about allowing the usage of debuggers in exams as he was totally against the idea leaving us with printf debugging in a 2h exam session.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen As a kid I thought coding seemed cool and wrote a 30 second program in basic in a text file I renamed to an .exe.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen Gate keeping programming and thinking it makes you special is incredibly sad.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen There's a big difference between "being able to" and actually doing it.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen People have a superiority complex for working in the hardest way possible because “that’s how I had to do it”.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen You should be able to code in Notepad just so you can truly relish the joy of not having to.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen MAJOR DISAGREE
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen You shouldn’t have to code this way for serious projects.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen I think the point is that you should be able to code well enough that IDE is a tool to help you and make you more efficient, not a tool that allows you to do it at all - you can still do it without an IDE, it's just slow and annoying.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen To assert dominance
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen Nothing has more forever-a-junior-level-programmer energy than “You should spend more time and energy looking up API calls and typing console commands instead of using that time to iterate on your design and improve your code” takes
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen That is just another IT-twitter bait, just mute or block him, he is fuckwad.
May 03, 2024
I could write all my code in assembler too.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen chill bro it's an engagement bait
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen Yeah if it's available use it.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen Old guys trying to act like their depreciating skillset makes them more valuable...
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen It’s a showcase of the « I’m stronger than you » syndrome so many programmers have.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen For the first few months of my first web development job I was using notepad++.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen I was once interviewed where they asked me to write code and diagram databases in Notepad 🤦‍♂️
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen I start to consider to go back to a simple text editor, like when I was using emacs at school, juste because VS is getting worse.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen You shouldn't actually do it.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen Some people feel scared to give up lower level tasks to automatization.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen blue check farming engagement
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen The key word is ABLE.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen It's a meme from a person who posts nothing but memes on Twitter.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen it's bait.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen it's just coder bravado to show off toy algorithms
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen They are signaling
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen Because when you have to fix something on a customer system then usually notepad/vim/nano is literally the only option you have, that's why.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen "You should be able to code with punch cards directly in binary" same energy
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen Debate is not about when you don't want to use notepad, but when you are not able to use it.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen The anti-tooling discourse in programming is quite tiring
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen You should be *able* to, it shows that you understand what you're writing, but you shouldn't *actually* do it because it's ridiculously inefficient
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen Real programmers use a magnetized needle and a steady hand.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen Tbf intelisense is just a faster way of finding the right code/method to do something instead of finding it online or in a book...
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen I started in notepad, now I use vim for all my programming needs
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen I had that at an interview once.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen I once was in an interview where they handed me a pen and paper and said "write this program"
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen Honestly the meme works infinitely better if you sub IntelliSense out for Copilot.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen @SebAaltonen use whatever you want
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen The meme isn't saying you shouldn't use it, it's saying you should be *able* to still program without it.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen Because that’s how we learned and you should too 😂
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen It's like telling a carpenter "You should be able to do all your work without power tools".
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen It makes old people feel cool, because they at some point were forced to code like that
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen You are an intellisense yourself if you have the references at your disposal.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen "Should be able to" doesn't mean "prefer to." It's just a base line level of fluency that implies more experience and probably more competency.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen I think there is some value in this.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen It's not about wanting, it's about being able to.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen No need to do that.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen they just gaslight themselves that their broken vim config is equivalent to a proper IDE
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen Simple editors tend to lead to other bad choices to compensate.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen The decel mind is perplexing 🤔
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen Folks advocating for "notepad" coding is much like a grandfather boasting how he walked to school during a blizzard.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen To prove twitter they're good coders
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen i sort of agree, but i'm so often forced to code with no functional IDE when teaching students (cos they haven't set up correctly) that i can say it's a helpful skill to keep.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen It's obvious engagement farming / rage bait.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen It's a desire to appear extraordinarily competent without having worked enough for it.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen Because I don’t want the distractions, I don’t want my hand held, I just want to type, typos and all.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen I would agree with the original poster.
May 03, 2024
@SebAaltonen Hell, I used notepad++ for my shitty terraria mods and the TML discord act like I sacrificed them all to Satan lmfao
Sep 04, 2023
@SebAaltonen @threadreaderapp unroll
Sep 04, 2023
@SebAaltonen What if we had some kind of special syntax sugar, which is later split into two calls.
Sep 03, 2023
@SebAaltonen You might be interested in https://2022.ecoop.org/details/ecoop-2022-papers/17/What-If-We-Don-t-Pop-the-Stack-The-Return-of-Second-Class-Values
Sep 03, 2023
@SebAaltonen I like how Jai solved this.
Sep 03, 2023
@SebAaltonen Ada does this
Jan 08, 2023
@SebAaltonen Very nicely put together, but one big omission (imo) is the split of cache on said 144MB SKUs, since they use two CCDs and historically (seen in some benchmarks too) games hate being split, they like a single cache pool for a group of cores they work on and thats more or less it.
Jan 07, 2023
@SebAaltonen Compiling translation units (cpp files) don’t benefit generally by large cache.
Jan 07, 2023
@SebAaltonen well, this is about to change in llvm at least https://llvm.org/devmtg/2019-10/slides/Ganea-OptimizingBuildesOnWindows.pdf
Jan 06, 2023
@SebAaltonen Caches work with physical addresses.
Jan 06, 2023
@SebAaltonen Seb, for the next gen consoles, what is your AMD CPU wishlist? 16 core CPU? Big cache? 3D V-cache as you said?
Nov 23, 2022
@SebAaltonen One of the biggest roadblocks when I was trying to learn Vulkan was the descriptor API.
Nov 23, 2022
@SebAaltonen @SheriefFYI When I started with modern graphics APIs (i.e., Vulkan) I felt like I was not understanding something because of how far it was from the idea of 'close to the metal' that intro readings stated.
Nov 23, 2022
@SebAaltonen Another Vulkan W.
Nov 23, 2022
@SebAaltonen Finally, was waiting on this one.
Nov 23, 2022
@SebAaltonen AFAIK that is only fully true on AMD GPUs, everyone else has to go through some pain to implement this extension.
Nov 23, 2022
@SebAaltonen This extension still lacks the ability to create descriptors in shaders from buffer memory.
Nov 22, 2022
@SebAaltonen Few more decades and will finally be back to where we never should have left from - writing HW registers.
Nov 22, 2022
@SebAaltonen "killing the graphics api" - what does that mean? how do you "kill" an api?
Nov 22, 2022
Hopefully in the future the existing Vulkan descriptor APIs can be removed.
Nov 22, 2022
@SebAaltonen Hooley Dooley
Nov 22, 2022
@SebAaltonen Yes! Please!!
Aug 04, 2022
@SebAaltonen Painkiller did that
Apr 13, 2022
@SebAaltonen agreed
Apr 13, 2022
@SebAaltonen YEEEEES!
Apr 13, 2022
@SebAaltonen While I agree when it comes to stuff built for game engines.
Apr 13, 2022
@SebAaltonen Oh, is that what ECS does? Give me control over execution flow?
Apr 13, 2022
@SebAaltonen Code Snippets > Libraries > Frameworks
Dec 07, 2020
@SebAaltonen I ended up going with an approach where I read the "chunk data" and then emit to an indice+mesh buffer and write the indirect dispatch from a compute shader.
May 06, 2019
@SebAaltonen TATAS (read-only inner-loop) is a much better pattern for a multicore system with multiple caches (https://github.com/concurrencykit/ck/blob/master/include/spinlock/fas.h#L77).
May 06, 2019
@SebAaltonen You can find many implementations here, including fair and scalable locks: https://github.com/concurrencykit/ck/blob/master/include/spinlock/fas.h
May 06, 2019
@SebAaltonen I have one suggestion: 1st stage you measure how long pause takes.
May 06, 2019
@SebAaltonen @kenpex Its a shame there is no mm_pause in the BAD case - it’s not obvious how much of the win comes from not using CAS vs pausing.
May 05, 2019
@SebAaltonen Interesting.
May 05, 2019
Don’t use spinlock for waits.
May 05, 2019
@SebAaltonen @septagh I would love to see a comparison to ARM64, from what I know its pretty similar but would be anyways interesting.
May 05, 2019
@SebAaltonen Got a link to the slide deck?
Jan 04, 2019
@SebAaltonen We in my team practice exact rules in our JavaScript codebase as my 5 years experience built confidence about the right way.
Jan 03, 2019
@SebAaltonen I didn’t understand everything, but what I did understand was very helpful.
Jan 02, 2019
@SebAaltonen @dan_abramov Please someone put this in an article or blog somewhere, I want to read it now n then.
Jan 02, 2019
@SebAaltonen That's a great read! I only disagree with 1.
Jan 02, 2019
@SebAaltonen Nice thread, altougth much can be generalized to „try to be pragmatic“, nice detailed list, which I naturally not completetly agree, especially I see no need for raw new/deletes anymore, when there are smrt_ptr, containers and allocaters.
Jan 02, 2019
@SebAaltonen Thank you for this.
Jan 02, 2019
@SebAaltonen Man....threads like this reminded me that A) I'm glad I use Ladder Logic for my programming and B) Ladder Logic is not "real programming".
Jan 02, 2019
@SebAaltonen Absolutely love this thread.
Jan 01, 2019
@SebAaltonen Νo surprise that most game devs had similar experiences.
Jan 01, 2019
@SebAaltonen There is a useful term for what you describe as “entanglement” that I learned recently - it is called “cyclomatic complexity” - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclomatic_complexity
Jan 01, 2019
@SebAaltonen is that really "highly controversial"? I can think quite a few things to say I suspect would rank above it
Jan 01, 2019
@SebAaltonen Please send this tweet back in time 20 years! it would have brought me some comfort in my c++ days
Jan 01, 2019
@SebAaltonen @mmalex Funny how install base changes architecture.
Jan 01, 2019
@borland @SebAaltonen No, he is specifically talking about DOD approach with priority on fast iteration and high performance.
Jan 01, 2019
@SebAaltonen Sorry, but for many people this is going to look like “lets all program in assembly” with “assembly” changed to “highly optimized cache-aware multithreaded DOD code”.
Nov 14, 2017
@SebAaltonen @ScottMcMillan0 @kingsamj @EricLengyel Thanks! Very helpful to know

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