AldousHaxley

I wish I knew earlier that I had enough knowledge to build production quality applications. I had this idea early on that I had to attain some level of mastery that was always just outside of my reach, and that the only remedy to that was learning everything possible under the sun. But after spending years trying to get to that point, I realized that I could have been building and shipping products that whole time. If I could do the last decade over, that realization would have the most profound impact.

I remember those anxious days before Longhorn's release. MS was making a lot of weird threats back then. All the "trusted computing" stuff, as well as the thinly veiled attempts at killing OpenGL on Windows. Despite my above waxing nostalgic about the API, I haven't built anything with D3D in years, for precisely the issues you mentioned. API design quality and performance are important, but they are far from the only factors that go into making such a decision.

bgfx looks really cool, thanks for letting me know about it!

GL 3.x is my current go to for the case of needing simple immediate mode 3D rendering. But it's still Bring Your Own Matrices/Texture Loading/Text Rendering/Model Loading, and D3D9 + D3DX had that all in a nice package. Like I said, stitching this stuff together isn't the hardest thing ever, but it's nice to have a basic set of boilerplate that's idiomatically consistent and works out of the box.

Those are higher level scene graphs. D3D9 was an immediate mode API with some helper libraries, so you still were in control of your app's rendering architecture.

D3D9 is my all-time favorite 3D API. It was at that sweet spot of being powerful enough that you could do stunning things with it (the Xbox 360 generation is effectively D3D9-level hardware), and it was simple enough that amateurs and hobbyists (and high school kids, as I was at the time) could dive in and get stuff on the screen relatively quickly. D3DX had some handy helper libraries for loading models, doing transforms, and loading textures. I get the benefits afforded by subsequent iterations, and nowadays Vulkan and D3D12, but their interfaces are so optimized toward specialists, and it would be nice if more was in place to cover that middle ground use case between "I don't need a full-on 3D game engine, but I don't need to worry about low level GPU stuff either." Of the new APIs out there, I feel like Metal is the only one approaching layperson usability, and it's trapped in the world of Mac and iOS. Of course you can stitch together something that looks like an open source equivalent of the old D3D9 SDK yourself from things like glm and AssImp, but it's nice to have all that in one package.

I get the value of garbage collectors, but honestly until Go I wasn't too fond of them, as I'd find myself spending about as much time thinking about memory management in Java as in C. At least with C you don't have the same lack of determinism as you do with traditional GC languages.

I find recent language trends interesting. Moving away from VMs to native binaries, away from Java-style GCs and embracing ARC and smart pointers. I have a strong bias toward minimalism, so I like the trend. If it serves to remind people that CPU time and memory, while incredibly cheap, isn't free, then all the better.

This is a really encouraging trend. For all the things I love about iOS (not to mention all the years supporting myself on iOS dev work), I love the fact that on desktop platforms, developers can just write a program, throw it up on the Internet, and have people use it or even pay for it without any middleman.

I don't have some deep moral objection to software walled gardens (if that fits your use requirements, more power to you!), but if that model ever wins out, it will be a sad day for innovation. Software's one of the most powerful tools in recent history for disruption, and having a centralized entity wield control over that creates a dangerous bottleneck for this relatively new, extremely powerful medium for human expression. Good to see that, on at least some level, the market agrees with me.

Yeah, collaborative drawing is kind of old hat, but when you can use the context of the modern, social web to provide some new modes of interaction around it, it can be interesting again. Same applies to more mundane things like text.

YES! So many things to read, and I hate having a million tabs open at once. Even if I don't get around to something until months later, bookmarks are an indispensable tool.