June 2014 Media Thread

ArisKatsaris

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.
If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.

Note for this month's thread: As per comment in last month's 'meta' subthread, the "Television and Movies" subthread has been split into two: "TV and Movies (Animation)" and "TV and Movies (Live Action)"

Rules:

Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.
If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.

Just a matter of time. We're already a long way from assembler, and the indie games represent the low end which will gradually eat the high end's lunch.

It might be possible to move on with a "sufficiently advanced compiler" for Haskell or the like, but barring that I think game devs for performance-intensive games will still want more precise control over memory usage. I predict we'll see widespread use of "functional C++" (eg Rust, or C++ 11's functional features) before "low-level Haskell" (eg ???).

Given Haskell's excellent concurrency support, I'm not sure that's true.

As far as I know Haskell's performance isn't considered predictable/reliable (mainly due to GC and lazy evaluation) enough for games. If even multi-threaded C++ is still too slow for what you want to do (eg have 10000 people on one server in real-time), Haskell isn't going help.

At one point Epic was looking at Haskell, but recently they've actually gone the other way, abandoning embedded scripting languages in the newest version of the Unreal engine in favour of doing everything in C++ (although I think that was as much about consistency as performance).

(By the way, as a Scala dev I'd personally rather write Haskell than C++, and C++ is one of the things keeping me out of the gaming industry, but personally I'm not optimistic).

barring that I think game devs for performance-intensive games will still want more precise control over memory usage

What is 'performance-intensive' is constantly changing. I don't think that languages like C# or JavaScript which sometimes get used in game development these days have sufficiently-advanced compilers, but they still get used. (Although at least in the case of Haskell, we really do have the promised 'sufficiently advanced compiler' in the form of GHC and all the research put into optimizing lazy pure languages; I think the estimate I saw f... (read more)

2lmm12y

I've worked with videoconferencing software written in Haskell. Realtime performance is certainly possible, though whether the industry will accept that is another question.

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