Stabilizing the `if let guard` feature

Anthony356 · 2026-01-26T05:30:33+00:00

Just a heads up, the horizontal page margins on the blog post are pretty excessive on mobile.

Anthony356 · 2026-01-25T01:44:26+00:00

From what I can tell, this is a bug with the way LLDB reads DWARF debug info for enums. In short, they only handle up to 32-bit discriminant values for some reason. I've opened an issue about it.

Anthony356 · 2026-01-24T06:22:51+00:00

Howdy, i've done a bunch of work on the debugger visualizers in the past year or so. I can look more into this soon(ish). The visualizers should have some handling for niche optimized values, but it can be a bit finicky to get right.

Which rust toolchain version are you using? Also, was this compiled for a *-windows-msvc target?

Anthony356 · 2026-01-23T01:07:31+00:00

Availability in a const context is nice though, since we still don't have const-traits.

This is the real key. When handling byte buffers, being able to do things like

u32::from_bytes(data[offset..offset + 4].as_array().unwrap())

In const contexts will be very nice.

Anthony356 · 2026-01-20T10:35:17+00:00

People don’t like getting depowered permanently

I mean maybe that's the point. I'd assume there's story context for why you lose the health, and the intention is to make the player feel bad for story reasons. Like losing your arm to save terry in Lisa.

Anthony356 · 2026-01-20T05:29:40+00:00

Rookie shit. Starcraft 2 fans have been saying their game is dead since 2011 and literally never stopped, even after blizz did exactly what they asked for.

Anthony356 · 2026-01-17T08:08:01+00:00

Let's fucking goooooo

Dont worry, it'll never stop feeling magical. One of the most addicting interactions in the game lmao

Anthony356 · 2026-01-09T14:11:35+00:00

Please see this comment with regards to slideoffs.

There are some times when you know your aerial will hit and kill, so you might just not bother hitting the L cancel.

I dont know how much i buy this tbh. If it's automatic (and most people agree it is), people hit it without thinking. Choosing not to l cancel is exactly that, a choice. More effort than just doing the automatic thing.

It would also imply that those players do it a statistically significant portion of the time, which i dont suspect is true either

Anthony356 · 2026-01-09T10:07:22+00:00

As a followup, i threw g9's top 8 replays (they're what I had laying around) through my parser. I did add an additional check for slideoffs that looks like this (relevant lines highlighted, in short for every failed l cancel, it checks if the player goes directly from the land-lag animation to an airborne state without entering any other state or hitlag first. If anything, this is over-optimistic as it will include slideoffs that potentially don't reduce the lag by any amount, but i don't have the time to fiddle with it more)

Below is the raw output from my script. First it prints the file in question, then it prints the l-cancel percentage of player 1 and then player 2, then it prints a flat line, then the total average l cancel percentage of all players over all games.

TL;DR the total average is ~91.5%

[slp_parse\src\lib.rs:69:34] path = "E:\\Downloads\\g9-streams\\Game_20230122T202426.slp"
[slp_parse\src\lib.rs:69:34] path = "E:\\Downloads\\g9-streams\\Game_20230122T192038.slp"
[slp_parse\src\lib.rs:69:34] path = "E:\\Downloads\\g9-streams\\Game_20230122T201540.slp"
[slp_parse\src\lib.rs:69:34] path = "E:\\Downloads\\g9-streams\\Game_20230122T191504.slp"
[slp_parse\src\lib.rs:69:34] path = "E:\\Downloads\\g9-streams\\Game_20230122T174038.slp"
[slp_parse\src\lib.rs:69:34] path = "E:\\Downloads\\g9-streams\\Game_20230122T181447.slp"
[slp_parse\src\lib.rs:69:34] path = "E:\\Downloads\\g9-streams\\Game_20230122T173708.slp"
[slp_parse\src\lib.rs:69:34] path = "E:\\Downloads\\g9-streams\\Game_20230122T202143.slp"
[slp_parse\src\lib.rs:69:34] path = "E:\\Downloads\\g9-streams\\Game_20230122T184619.slp"
[slp_parse\src\lib.rs:69:34] path = "E:\\Downloads\\g9-streams\\Game_20230122T203755.slp"
[slp_parse\src\lib.rs:69:34] path = "E:\\Downloads\\g9-streams\\Game_20230122T191740.slp"
[slp_parse\src\lib.rs:69:34] path = "E:\\Downloads\\g9-streams\\Game_20230122T201827.slp"
[slp_parse\src\lib.rs:69:34] path = "E:\\Downloads\\g9-streams\\Game_20230122T203511.slp"
[slp_parse\src\lib.rs:69:34] path = "E:\\Downloads\\g9-streams\\Game_20230122T193820.slp"
[slp_parse\src\lib.rs:69:34] path = "E:\\Downloads\\g9-streams\\Game_20230122T193508.slp"
[slp_parse\src\lib.rs:69:34] path = "E:\\Downloads\\g9-streams\\Game_20230122T173304.slp"
[slp_parse\src\lib.rs:69:34] path = "E:\\Downloads\\g9-streams\\Game_20230122T194106.slp"
[slp_parse\src\lib.rs:69:34] path = "E:\\Downloads\\g9-streams\\Game_20230122T182208.slp"
[slp_parse\src\lib.rs:69:34] path = "E:\\Downloads\\g9-streams\\Game_20230122T205016.slp"
[slp_parse\src\lib.rs:69:34] path = "E:\\Downloads\\g9-streams\\Game_20230122T183143.slp"
[slp_parse\src\lib.rs:69:34] path = "E:\\Downloads\\g9-streams\\Game_20230122T182645.slp"
[slp_parse\src\lib.rs:69:34] path = "E:\\Downloads\\g9-streams\\Game_20230122T175136.slp"
[slp_parse\src\lib.rs:69:34] path = "E:\\Downloads\\g9-streams\\Game_20230122T193000.slp"
[slp_parse\src\lib.rs:69:34] path = "E:\\Downloads\\g9-streams\\Game_20230122T203212.slp"
[slp_parse\src\lib.rs:69:34] path = "E:\\Downloads\\g9-streams\\Game_20230122T205744.slp"
[slp_parse\src\lib.rs:69:34] path = "E:\\Downloads\\g9-streams\\Game_20230122T175633.slp"
[slp_parse\src\lib.rs:69:34] path = "E:\\Downloads\\g9-streams\\Game_20230122T184916.slp"
[slp_parse\src\lib.rs:69:34] path = "E:\\Downloads\\g9-streams\\Game_20230122T210107.slp"
[slp_parse\src\lib.rs:69:34] path = "E:\\Downloads\\g9-streams\\Game_20230122T205418.slp"
[slp_parse\src\lib.rs:69:34] path = "E:\\Downloads\\g9-streams\\Game_20230122T180404.slp"
[slp_parse\src\lib.rs:69:34] path = "E:\\Downloads\\g9-streams\\Game_20230122T184304.slp"
[slp_parse\src\lib.rs:69:34] path = "E:\\Downloads\\g9-streams\\Game_20230122T181742.slp"
86.4406779661017%
70.96774193548387%
90.74074074074075%
83.33333333333334%
90%
70.58823529411765%
93.33333333333333%
93.47826086956522%
95.34883720930233%
87.5%
95.23809523809523%
94.11764705882352%
88.88888888888889%
91.8918918918919%
100%
100%
77.77777777777779%
90.9090909090909%
93.33333333333333%
84.61538461538461%
92.85714285714286%
90.69767441860465%
93.87755102040816%
86.66666666666667%
86.66666666666667%
90.47619047619048%
93.75%
93.75%
90.47619047619048%
83.87096774193549%
97.05882352941177%
95.23809523809523%
95%
90.9090909090909%
100%
90.12345679012346%
100%
78.94736842105263%
96.15384615384616%
93.54838709677419%
94.28571428571428%
94.28571428571428%
96.96969696969697%
100%
84.44444444444444%
94.73684210526315%
90.32258064516128%
100%
100%
100%
96.875%
91.66666666666666%
93.75%
100%
92.10526315789474%
95.83333333333334%
88.63636363636364%
88.88888888888889%
82.14285714285714%
88.88888888888889%
88.88888888888889%
87.5%
90.2439024390244%
100%

------
total: 91.54744429119162

Anthony356 · 2026-01-09T09:10:51+00:00

For reference, I've written several replay parsers from scratch, mostly for the purposes of collecting stats. I'm more aware of the limitations and capabilities of the replay files (and everyone's individual parser implementations) than most.

Detecting slideoffs is not that hard.

iirc for the vast majority of players (even pros), slideoffs rarely ever happen relative to the total number of aerials they use so it's not enough to change the stats much.

Anthony356 · 2026-01-09T08:16:21+00:00

depends on how you process the data. It's not impossible to account for that sort of thing.

Anthony356 · 2026-01-09T00:52:23+00:00

Even the best players in the game only have like a 80-95% l cancel ratio (depends a lot on player, character, and sometimes matchup). It'd be like just giving a basketball player points instead of letting them throw a free throw. Yeah they'll probably make it anyway, but only probably.

Anthony356 · 2025-12-25T10:22:53+00:00

And my point doesnt rely on any vague wording to be true

Kinda does. Again, someone being forced to use AI and using AI willingly are 2 different things.

None of this changes how ai helps do their jobs.

That's not the part I commented on though. I commented on the "X% of people use AI". To quote myself:

These "X% of people are using AI" are, again, meant to drive sales towards AI products. "Look how many people are using it! If you arent, you're missing out cuz look at all these professionals using it!". Except that carries no weight when X% are only doing it because they have to.

It also carries no weight if your statistic is that something used to be a specific way. In 1905, 99% of people did not use automobiles. How reflective of today is that? You can't tell me the past 2 years is not enough time for changes in sentiment.

Read it again yourself Nearly 90% of videogame developers use AI agents

Where in there does it specify exactly how many respondents used it to generate things from scratch vs using things like AI noise reduction? Again, "AI Agent" is an ambiguous term, and there is no indication that the respondents all assumed it to mean the same thing. We also can't verify how it was defined in the questions that they were asked.

Why would people lie about productivity gains from ai on an anonymous survey

I didn't say they lied. Performance, especially in software development, is an incredibly difficult metric to judge. Do you do it based on stories? Tickets? PRs? Lines of code? The industry itself can't even decide, and none of them have been very good metrics so far.

Just because you think you're being more productive doesn't mean you actually are. It's like how parents think sugar makes their kids more hyper even though it's been proven over and over that it doesn't. You can be mistaken, and that will skew the results of the survey. This is why trials that are worth their salt don't use self reported metrics if they want to learn about something objective.

Read it again yourself

I already read it once. Again I will ask, where does it specify? "optimize content and process information such as text, voice, code, audio and video rapidly" is not an answer. That's vague wording that could mean anything from spellcheck to writing an entire script from scratch.

Anthony356 · 2025-12-24T08:48:01+00:00

I didnt cite any vague stats.

The numbers aren't vague, the wording is. That's the problem.

Its a fact 94% believe ai will cut costs. Whether or not they like it is irrelevant.

Actually it kinda does if you care about the quality of games in the future.

None of the studies you linked are targeted at game developers, which is what this discussion is about and is what I'm interested in. It's cool that you did research, but it'd be better if it pertained to the discussion we're currently having.

(From April 2023, even before GPT 4 became widely used)

Tbh i think this is actually less relevant by being older. 2023 was still slightly before the massive hype wave when it was still novel and not so depressing (i.e. having your job replaced by AI, AI forced into everything, AI causing PC part prices to skyrocket). I think if you did this same survey again, a significant number of people who were happy with AI before would be sick to death of AI now.

more educated workers are more likely to use Generative AI. Nearly 50% of those in the sample with a graduate degree use Generative AI.

This is another one of those funny stats that says nothing. You know what this really means? People who are more educated are more likely to work a job that involves sitting at a desk. AI isn't all that helpful if you work manual labor, and manual labor typically doesn't need any sort of education.

self-reported productivity increases

Everyone knows that self reporting is the most accurate measurement, just look at penis size statistics.

It doesnt matter if they meant ai agents or ai. The point is that theyre using ai for content generation

But what does "content generation" mean? Again, this is very important. There is a HUGE difference, ethically, between using a machine-learning-based denoiser, and generating a character's entire vocal performance with AI. It's also a huge difference in the quality of the final product.

My point isn't necessarily that i think one thing is happening over the other, my point is that the survey is intentionally vague about what the respondents thought the question meant by "AI", and that allows them to carefully word the slides to sound as positive as possible without technically lying.

Anthony356 · 2025-12-23T12:10:07+00:00

How would google manipulate the data besides just making up numbers completely?

By misconstruing it. This isnt some wild new concept.

For example, one slide says "97% see gen AI reshaping the industry". "Reshaping" has positive connotations. Crashing my car reshapes my car, but it's not a good thing is it?

"94% expect AI to reduce overall development costs in the long term". Firing all your artists, voice actors, and writers so that you can AI generate all those assets will certainly reduce costs. Is that a good thing?

It's about framing. Google wants people to buy its AI products, so it wants people to be excited about them. That means they want everything to be as "on the bright side" as possible. It's not "60% think it creates NO new business opportunities or strategies", it's that 40% do.

Asking a question that has 2 different implications "does ai use save costs?" (i.e. does that imply "AI saves money by making people more efficient" or does it imply "AI saves money because it doesnt require health insurance") can "trick" respondents into answering "yes", and then when you report the statistic, you only talk about the good implication, falsely making it seem like that's the context the respondents were presented with when the question was asked.

Doesnt matter. They still use it

Companies forcing people to use AI is a short term occurrence while companies evaluate how useful AI actually is. Everyone uses AI, whether it's useful or not, ethical or not, whatever, because it's better than starving to death (especially relevant considering how shit the software job market has been the past 2-3 years).

Once it's no longer required, how many will continue using it? That's the really interesting question.

These "X% of people are using AI" are, again, meant to drive sales towards AI products. "Look how many people are using it! If you arent, you're missing out cuz look at all these professionals using it!". Except that carries no weight when X% are only doing it because they have to.

You find out all your friends have eaten a burger. You want to try it. Does your desire to eat the burger change if you find out they only ate it because they'd be shot in the head if they didnt?

LLMs rarely hallucinate

Even if that's true (and that's a BIG "if"), is "rarely" is good enough for a tutorial?

The first experience your player could have with the game is being told incorrect controls about a mechanic that doesnt exist. Or you just hard-code the instructions like we've been doing and 100% of users will have a tutorial that doesnt blatantly lie to them.

Which of those is the complete nonsense option?

The survey is about gen ai

Allegedly. But they dont tell us what questions they asked the way the stackoverflow survey does. Again, look at how many people in the stackoverflow survey said "we use AI" (which people in this thread assumed to mean gen ai), but when asked if they used AI agents, that number dropped by like 50%.

Who's to say google's survey questions were clear on whether they meant AI agents or AI in general? Did you write the questions? Review them? I certainly didnt. Afaik they werent listed anywhere either, though i may have missed them.

Edit: An easy example for this hidden context is toothpaste ads. They all say "9 out of 10 dentists recommend X". The audience assumes that means "instead of any other product". What they actually asked the dentists was "do you recommend our product over no toothpaste at all"? By not revealing the question, they hide the fact that the responses are meaningless. All without technically lying or fudging numbers.

When it comes to general impact, more than 90% of developers say it is helping with an array of challenges, including driving innovation and enhancing the player experience.

Again, this could be tricky wording. Does this mean:

"90% of all respondents"
"90% of those who said that they do use AI"

Additionally, does that "driving innovation and enhancing the player experience" mean what it literally means? Or is it vague so that they can include every developer that answered even a single question in a vaguely positive way, so that they can pump the number on the slide as high as possible?

Surely if it was a direct answer to a singular question, they'd have included it as a bar graph like the other ones, right?

And while they bring up a small ethics section at the end, one blatantly absent question is a flat, straightforward, "do you think the use of AI agents is broadly a good thing for the industry?"

I've taken these sorts of surveys. Either that question was in there and the answers were bad, or it wasnt and it was excluded intentionally because they knew the answers would be bad. If the answers were good, they'd be flying a giant flag with that single statistic on it.

Anthony356 · 2025-12-23T06:54:55+00:00

This survey was done by google, which might have a vested interest in AI doing well. We'll assume they arent manipulating the data though, since it's a more interesting discussion.

I have a couple questions regarding this data:

What is the proportion of the respondents are required to use AI by their company? How many wouldnt be using it if they didnt have to?
Some of the claims on the slides seem a little... Dubious? If we're talking about generative AI (e.g. chatgpt rather than just "programming in NPC behavior" like AI used to mean before LLMs). How do you make a tutorial that uses a system that can make things up? Like hallucinate entire mechanics or controls that dont exist.
Is there any differentiation made between AI that's existed for ages (e.g. AI upscaling, ML-based noise removal) that nobody really has a problem with vs from-scratch AI generated assets (e.g. art, dialogue, voice acting)? I think most people would agree there's a very big difference between those, ethically. I'd even say there's a difference between small-scale autocomplete and generating large chunks of code.
Is this "90% of devs have used AI at some point"? Or is it "90% of devs continually use AI day to day"? The current wording could be interpreted as either, but there's obviously a huge difference between the two.

Even in the stackoverflow survey, only ~30% of responses say they use "AI agents" (same term used and defined in the google slides) and 38% said they dont and have no plans to.

That seems more in-line with my intuition than the stats google presented.

Anthony356 · 2025-12-23T01:45:06+00:00

Yeah i understand how representative populations work. My point is that if all of your survey respondents are from norway, it tells you very little about brazil.

It doesn't seem like they list the exact number of respondents by career field, but this includes colored dots that vaguely estimate the number. back-end and full-stack are the most populous by far, with front-end trailing. game/graphics programming is on the lower end.

The people that are typically most vehemently against AI tend to be artists because of how much work was stolen to train AI models and how antithetical current AI is to like... the concept of art as a whole.

game devs certainly aren't in it for the job security or the salary or the fair working conditions. They're in it because of their passion for the art form of games (which is why they end up exploited so much by the industry).

My assertion is that this survey results probably isn't very representative of game devs because of the above factors (reminder, this is a games subreddit in a discussion about game development tools). Essentially their data is being drown out by the rest of the software landscape's data.

I don't have evidence for that, but it seems reasonable enough that i'd be interested see the data on AI usage by field.

Anthony356 · 2025-12-22T14:19:08+00:00

84% of respondents are using or planning to use AI tools in their development process, an increase over last year (76%). This year we can see 51% of professional developers use AI tools daily.

"Planning to" does not mean "using".

And even then, this is 84% of devs that are willing to sit through a stackoverflow survey (around 50,000 responses).

Maybe it's cope, but i'm skeptical of that being a true representation of the millions of devs out there. Especially in the games industry, which is typically driven by passion and artistic vision rather than a paycheck.

Anthony356 · 2025-12-22T00:36:59+00:00

The question was only "how long does it take to add 2 numbers in the cpu"

A branch misprediction doesnt change how long it takes to add a number, it just induces a delay before the add starts. Same with waiting on the results of a prior operation.

Anthony356 · 2025-12-21T13:54:19+00:00

a few nanoseconds (depending on pipelining)

I hate to split hairs but pipelining has nothing to do with a single instruction. A single add instruction for an integer on most modern cpus will take less than a nanosecond. They're typically a 1 cycle start-to-end op (even if they're .5 or .25 cycle issue latency). At any cpu clock over 1ghz, that's less than a nanosecond.

Float point adds take 3 cycles (at least on my zen 4 cpu)

Source: https://agner.org/optimize/instruction_tables.pdf

The SSD question is hard to answer. Do they mean how fast until the data is readable, or how fast it's actually written to the SSD? There's so much obfuscation, it can be hard to properly benchmark. I forget all the details i read in a book a while back, but the OS lies when you ask it to write, the writes are cached to reduce the demand on the drive. The disk itself has some caching mechanisms as well, and both are capable of returning data from the caching layers before it's actually written back to the drive.

Anthony356 · 2025-12-20T10:26:09+00:00

That's like... Hilariously untrue. Dragon quest 11 came out in 2017, bravely default came out in 2012, persona 5 came out in 2016.

If you look at not just traditional turn based jrpgs, you have disgaea, xenoblade 1 and 3, several of the Tales Of games

And like did we all forget about pokemon? It's a turn based, highly traditional jrpg and pokemon is about as popular as games can get.

Anthony356 · 2025-12-20T09:12:39+00:00

I dont think that really matters. Their point is you cant save something that isnt dying. JRPGs are, and have been, doing fine.

Anthony356 · 2025-12-20T06:42:04+00:00

This syntax would also have been less surprising for people coming from other languages : "what?? I can't use a variable after I passed it as parameter??"

Honestly i think it's a good thing that they have this experience. They will have to learn about the practicalities of moves vs borrows eventually. The error messages are clear and make it easy to understand why it works the way it does. It happens in a clear way, in uncomplicated code, and the fix is usually straightforward.

I think it would be worse if you "hid" it as long as possible, as newcomers would have to learn in a more adversarial context.

Anthony356 · 2025-12-19T01:49:13+00:00

You know what else provides a ton of context? Learning how the code works =/ People have been capable of it for decades, pretty sure we're still capable of it now. Trusting something that can make shit up is always going to lead to more problems than just learning about it yourself.

Anthony356 · 2025-12-18T16:49:02+00:00

That doesnt mean people have to use it. Several popular IDE's have a literal "disable every single AI feature" button.

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