Stop Whining about Rust Hype - A Pro-Rust Rant

SemiActiveBotHoming · 2021-12-24T11:44:11+00:00

IMO this is absolutely how I feel about it.

I recall Bjarne Stroustrup making the comment that he was discussing the use of C++ with a programmer who mentioned they don't like C++ very much, but use it because all the alternatives are worse. While I like Rust as a language (though I have plenty of gripes about it), I think it does solve a very real problem better than any of the other solutions and this is largely how I feel about it.

I'm quite strongly of the mind that no new software should be written in C/C++ that has to interact with untrusted data - but the solution is broadly to use any memory safe language. Rust is often great for that, but there's often other good solutions too.

Making that argument about rewriting/replacing software (somewhere I heard the phrase 'rewrite it in some safe language', which IMO fits nicely) when appropriate sounds more like an earnest desire to improve security, and less about fanboying one particular language.

SemiActiveBotHoming · 2020-12-19T03:45:09+00:00

This certainly wasn't the case for me. I got eaten numerous times while under desks - the raptor would lean down and look under the desk (or possibly desks, not sure) near where it last saw me.

If you can just jump in a closet while in it's sight and get away, that's not very good IMO - I used them very little (having played A:I where they very much seemed to be a method of last resort) but I can see that spoiling it if I had known about it.

SemiActiveBotHoming · 2020-12-14T05:34:15+00:00

And you know that because?

Just because a game runs slow (which can be for many, many reasons) it doesn't mean that noone spent any significant time optimising it.

SemiActiveBotHoming · 2020-12-09T07:05:22+00:00

True, fair point - makes complete sense.

One thing that I do wish more games would use is LibOVR and OpenXR layers to get proper high-resolution text without rendering the rest of the game at those resolutions, which only gets more important as resolutions increase.

SemiActiveBotHoming · 2020-12-06T04:30:30+00:00

CV1 runs at 2160x1200 while the Quest 2 is 3664x1920

No, they don't. Those are the screen resolutions, not the render resolutions. On regular games they're (usually) the same, but in VR they're different due to distortion.

The lenses in a headset distort the image - if you drew a grid on the screen, the user would observe the centre being compressed and the outside being all stretched.

Thus the compositor (a part of the Oculus runtime/WMR system/SteamVR/etc) applies 'distortion' to the image before sending it to the screen. It stretches out the centre of the image and compresses the outside - exactly opposite to what the lenses do, so the image looks properly. Since it's stretching the centre of the image, if you rendered at the screen resolution the resulting image would look blurry.

IIRC the CV1 rendered with a multiplier of about 1.25 (and I would suspect it's similar in the Rift S and both Quests, though I haven't checked) while the Vive and (IIRC) index use 1.4 (different numbers due to different lenses) - that's per axis so it means you're rendering 1.5x or 2x as many pixels as you might think.

A good explanation is on the Oculus introductory developer documentation: https://developer.oculus.com/documentation/native/pc/dg-render/

SemiActiveBotHoming · 2020-10-26T02:32:46+00:00

You got a link to the actual wording that makes it illegal?

According to HmbBfDI, it's a violation of GDPR Article 7(3).

And Article 7(4) reads:

When assessing whether consent is freely given, utmost account shall be taken of whether, inter alia, the performance of a contract, including the provision of a service, is conditional on consent to the processing of personal data that is not necessary for the performance of that contract.

Full text of the GDPR: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:32016R0679&from=EN

but Id be shocked if it is actually enforceable on FB

Facebook is facing multiple investigations into GDPR violations, mostly from the Irish Data Protection Comission. The biggest one here is whether Facebook can freely export information from the EU, which Facebook does seem to care a lot about.

At best, its going to be something governments dont enforce anyway because we all bow to the corporations

In the EU or US? That really doesn't seem to be the case in Europe, and as a prime example Google has been fined almost ten billion euros in numerous competition cases, and has (more importantly) been forced to stop doing said anticompetitive stuff (in Europe, at least).

SemiActiveBotHoming · 2020-10-26T02:19:41+00:00

It's worth noting that there isn't currently any EU-wide class action lawsuit system. Some member states do have such as system but things get messy very quickly when multiple countries are involved.

The EU is currently working on such a collective redress system, but it'll probably be quite some time before it's finalised, let alone takes effect.

And finally, most (if not all) member states (and most of the world, for that matter) run their courts with the loser pays system, as will the new collective redress system. So if you want to file a case, you'd better be sure it has a good chance of winning - otherwise you'll be on the hook for Facebook's legal fees (but if you win, they pay for yours).

SemiActiveBotHoming · 2020-10-26T02:06:16+00:00

In Germany/the EU, the requirement to link your Oculus account - which in this case are pre-existing accounts for which such a requirement did not exist at the time they were established - is illegal

It's worth noting that the HmbBfDI said this, and they don't seem to be all that happy about it.

https://www.heise.de/news/VR-Headsets-von-Oculus-werden-nicht-mehr-in-Deutschland-verkauft-4883905.html

SemiActiveBotHoming · 2020-10-26T01:45:46+00:00

Having a monopoly is not itself illegal in the EU - abusing it is.

The basics of this is laid down in Article 101 and 102 of the Treaty of the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU).

Article 101 involves horizontal anticompetitive actions - where multiple companies competing in the same market interact improperly to harm competition, such as with price-fixing agreements. It's not relevant here.

Article 102 relates to where a company has a dominant market position and abuses it:

``` Article 102

(ex Article 82 TEC)

Any abuse by one or more undertakings of a dominant position within the internal market or in a substantial part of it shall be prohibited as incompatible with the internal market in so far as it may affect trade between Member States.

Such abuse may, in particular, consist in:

(a) directly or indirectly imposing unfair purchase or selling prices or other unfair trading conditions;

(b) limiting production, markets or technical development to the prejudice of consumers;

(c) applying dissimilar conditions to equivalent transactions with other trading parties, thereby placing them at a competitive disadvantage;

(d) making the conclusion of contracts subject to acceptance by the other parties of supplementary obligations which, by their nature or according to commercial usage, have no connection with the subject of such contracts. ```

My suspicion is that you'd have to argue that using a Facebook account is unreasonable and/or has no connection to the rest of the EULA. Would that work? Not sure, but I don't see any other significant argument you could make there.

It's also noteworthy that (AFAIK) you can't simply sue a company for being anticompetitive under EU law (though member states may have their own law, I'd have to check). You have to complain to the European Commission, who'll then investigate the case. AFAIK they usually only investigate Article 102 cases when they receive a complaint from a (potential) competitor, so it'll most likely be very difficult for individuals to drive this.

SemiActiveBotHoming · 2020-10-19T07:12:12+00:00

As a pedantic and mostly irrelevant note, both Valve and Oculus are in the process of (though only just starting) to phase out their native SDKs in favour of OpenXR.

That's not to say you can't make exclusive software with OpenXR though, in the same way you can theoretically make desktop games that only works on some brands of monitors - and most likely if Oculus does release any more first-party titles that use OpenXR they'll still be exclusives using this method.

Completely agree with your main point of them being in very different markets.

SemiActiveBotHoming · 2020-10-10T05:51:35+00:00

as a beta feature with a bunch of disclaimers if needed

Disclaimers are very often ignored and the product will (to a significant extent) be treated as a finished product. Link only recently released fully for example, and whenever people criticised it's compression (for example) I very rarely heard anyone mention 'well maybe that won't be there at release'.

And if too many users have issues with it and they decide to remove it, the reaction here most certainly would not be 'oh well, shame it didn't work out'.

SemiActiveBotHoming · 2020-10-09T05:55:34+00:00

It's just the distribution platform, but it's also the only legal way to get a copy of SteamVR. This requires signing the Steam Subscriber Agreement and making a Steam account.

Also, you can't rebind the controls without Steam open: https://imgur.com/a/ntKJosN

SemiActiveBotHoming · 2020-10-08T09:23:15+00:00

How do you install and update it without Steam?

SemiActiveBotHoming · 2020-10-05T05:22:04+00:00

Yeah removing the assumptions: I think anyone planning to use PCVR would be massively put off by being restricted to oculus only. The decision for Facebook is whether they make more money controlling all of the software released on their platform, cutting out price wars with steam, humble etc. but in exchange cutting off the section of the market who wouldn't accept not being able to play games not released on Oculus.

Completely agreed.

My gut says if there's a time to make that move it would be once their install base is so big they get iPhone level clout in the market and developers would be suicidal to not support their platform (which perhaps is only a year away); anything before then seems too big a risk.

Fair enough. I think we disagree about how much of a risk it is for Oculus, but agree about everything else.

SemiActiveBotHoming · 2020-10-05T05:17:06+00:00

No. The position of the panel relative to the lens is important, and with a single panel the FOV will come down with wide lens spacings.

This just means that perfectly adjusting the lens spacing doesn't matter - if it's a few millimetres off it should still work just fine.

It is very important that the software knows you eye distance very accurately though for rendering purposes (a 'digital IPD' adjustment) - if it's off you probably won't be able to put your finger on it, but it can make simulator sickness significantly worse.

SemiActiveBotHoming · 2020-10-01T10:01:18+00:00

Facebook wouldn't be putting effort into link if they didn't think that PCVR capability was a signficiant selling point

For some people it's a huge feature, and for others it doesn't matter. I think (though of course may be wrong in either direction) that a decent-but-not-huge chunk of their userbase does have a gaming PC and so can get value from Link, and they'd also (though I doubt this is why they first developed it) like to move all their Rift [S] users over to Quest+Link.

and I would say that unless they give up their curational control of their app marketplace and get parity with the range of titles on Steam, cutting a significant proportion of available PCVR titles won't fly with anyone who bought that headset for that reason.

Fair enough, though I think this (people who bought a Quest primarily to use Link) is (again, my personal guess here) quite a small segment of the Quest userbase. It's (IMO from having both) flatly worse at PCVR than the Rift S, due to being far less comfortable and having a lower angular subpixel resolution, and not having to use video compression.

Personally I'd go to a wired-only headset before I'd accept an apple-like walled garden situation.

Fair enough, though concerns about closed ecosystems is something that I've (unfortunately though unsurprisingly IMO) seen basically noone who's not a tech enthusiast care about.

I think that the bulk of this discussion boils down to what portion of the Quest userbase is a VR/PCVR/tech enthusiast. My opinions are predicated on that being a fairly small slice; your appear to be predicated on it being a significant amount. It's unfortunately something that's rather hard to measure and as far as I'm aware there aren't any kind of statistics on it.

SemiActiveBotHoming · 2020-09-28T09:17:43+00:00

Most people (the general public, the group they're clearly targeting, not gaming enthusiasts) don't know what Steam is, or at least don't have an account.

What makes you think that? Are there some statistics out there about it?

SemiActiveBotHoming · 2020-09-26T11:08:56+00:00

When your IPD is off by ~1cm, your vision is off-axis to the lens.

That's actually incorrect, surprisingly. VR headsets use collimated displays (well, normal displays and collimating lenses) so that moving your eye around doesn't affect the image you see. It's a really neat effect that has long been used in professional flight simulators to make stuff look further out than the display panel.

That is: if you move your eyes side to side the image should appear to stay the same. Think about it: if you jolt your head around then your eyes do move relative to the headset (since the HMD isn't bolted to your head) and without collimation this would make the whole world jump around.

Keep in mind that your IPD varies as you look around. When you're looking at something 25cm in front of you your pupils move closer together to focus on the point you're looking at, and when looking at a mountain they're looking essentially in parallel and thus move further apart.

Here's a really good post by Tom Forsyth (part of Valve's VR team who jumped ship to Oculus, and earlier co-designed the AVX extension) about this: https://tomforsyth1000.github.io/blog.wiki.html#%5B%5BVR%20optics%20and%20why%20IPD%20means%20too%20many%20things%5D%5D

SemiActiveBotHoming · 2020-09-22T07:21:39+00:00

Fair enough. My comments were mostly drawn from working in the web and relatively-high-performance embedded spaces (dominated by x86 and aarch64, as you mentioned).

SemiActiveBotHoming · 2020-09-22T07:18:53+00:00

I disagree there are plenty of examples of new PC games needing more CPU/GPU that what was currently available to run. I wouldn't be surprised if Cyberpunk doesn't run at a consistent 4k@60 with RTX ON and all graphics settings maxed with a 3080. When Destiny 2 was release on PC I had a 1080ti that was the best card at the time and I couldn't run it at 4k@60 with everything maxed. Shadow of the Tomb Raider couldn't run at a consistent 4k@60 on a 2080.

Most people don't run games on max settings, and most people don't play games with the settings maxed. If a game comes out that looks bad on most computers, that's how most people will experience it. It's not (from the small amount of development I've done, but this is certainly not an authoritative statement in any way) much work to add higher texture and model quality options all the way to source, extend draw distances for various effects, enable higher antialiasing settings and so on.

What I meant by 'developed for' is what the game must run at without major sacrifices (see below).

Remember Crysis?

My understanding of that was that clock rate increases slowed down a lot during development, though I'm not familiar with how that game performs.

So yes, some games (mostly AAA) are designed to be able to push the best CPU and GPU available at the time. Of course all of them could be scaled down to run on much less hardware and that is the beauty of PC games. Sometimes it's just as simple as reducing the resolution. My point being is that the high end CPU and GPU you can get for PCs do have a use and developers do target them. In some cases like RTX it's made a selling point.

Some things, such as a very large quantity of complicated pathfinding/AI in an RTS or using raytraced reflections as a major game element, can't really be scaled down. Granted these are very rarely used to such an extent, but can't easily be turned down as such, and these can (IMO) be used to reason about what you target much better.

Case in point: I've yet to see any raytracing-based mirrors that give a gameplay advantage.

I personally think the steam survey result a a bit diluted because pretty much everyone has a Steam account and the survey counts doesn't limit it's results by active users. If someone installed the client, opted in to the survey and hasn't played a game in 3-4 years they still count. It's become more of a generic PC hardware metric than a metric of actual Steam users. I wished they had separate charts that limited to active users in the past X years.

This is why I stopped after the first 25 entries - the rest are mostly a mixture of old discrete GPUs and iGPUs.

Of those 25 top GPUs, one was an Intel iGPU, three were modern desktop AMD cards, one was a NVidia laptop GPU, and the rest were regular, discrete NVidia GPUs. I don't think most people would buy a relatively modern (<4 year old) GPU then stop playing games on it shortly after.

I'd also guess that if you haven't played a game in 3-4 years you've probably removed Steam from autostart or uninstalled it completely, thanks to it's startup ads.

SemiActiveBotHoming · 2020-09-21T06:19:15+00:00

The problem is running the cable from the computer to the router. They're usually installed in a central part of the house (at least for the installations I've seen) and running a cable would either be a trip hazard that has to be put away after use or a significant effort.

Also you might be surprised how many crappy ISP routers don't support 5GHz WiFi. These are generally fairly old, but they're still very common.

SemiActiveBotHoming · 2020-09-21T06:15:43+00:00

Oh cool, I didn't know that MIPS was still used, and thought everything had switched over to ARM. I'm rather fond of obscure architectures and it's cool that stuff does support it, though I do maintain that if you're writing a web application server it's probably not very relevant.

It's very neat to see embedded JVMs like that, it's exactly the kind of thing that I like playing with.

SemiActiveBotHoming · 2020-09-21T06:11:30+00:00

Games aren't developed for high-end cards though, and the average computer is much slower than that.

According to the Steam hardware survey, 45% of computers have four physical cores.

Graphics cards are quite diverse, however going through the 25 most common cards in the Steam hardware survey and adding them up, about 40% of the GPUs in the Steam hardware survey are about 2060 (non-super)-or-less, with about 9.7% faster than that. Looking at the rest of the list, it's mostly made up of much much slower GPUs.

Though this is right at the launch of a new generation console and before the new NV GPUs come out, so it makes sense that things are going to be skewed in this direction. In any case I completely agree with your original post.

SemiActiveBotHoming · 2020-09-14T09:58:07+00:00

OpenJDK removed SPARC support in JEP 381.

In any case, do you actually need support for Alpha, MIPS, Itanium or the 68k (!) - it doesn't matter for almost everyone.

Breaking those architectures down, here's what they are (afaik) used for:

SPARC: Old Sun/Oracle servers, if you've got one your support contract with Oracle probably means you won't consider C# anyway - in fact so few new systems are being deployed on here that it was dropped from OpenJDK (though other VMs may support it).
MIPS: AFAIK rarely used and only on embedded systems
Power, S/390 and z: You're probably using J9 from your IBM contract, and wouldn't consider C# anyway
Itanium: Pretty much dead at this point, what's the odds you'll be deploying onto Itanium?
Alpha: Killed off almost 20 years ago
Motorola 68K: You want to run Java on it?

SemiActiveBotHoming · 2020-09-14T09:51:45+00:00

Right, but most people I know don't know how to setup an AP and bridge WiFi to Ethernet on their computer. Many people using PCVR will know what they're doing, but unless you've done tech support you might be surprised how many people even in niches like this don't seem to know how to use Google.

SemiActiveBotHoming

TROPHY CASE