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Microsoft Dependency Has Risks

(blog.miloslavhomer.cz)
153 points ArcHound | 10 comments | 25 Jun 25 20:08 UTC | HN request time: 0.968s | source | bottom
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bob1029 ◴[25 Jun 25 21:41 UTC] No.44382065[source]▶
The trick with Microsoft is to very carefully separate the good parts from the bad ones.

Labeling all of Microsoft as banned is really constraining your technology options. This is a gigantic organization with a very diverse set of people in it.

There aren't many things like .NET, MSSQL and Visual Studio out there. The debugger experience in VS is the holy grail if you have super nasty real world technology situations. There's a reason every AAA game engine depends on it in some way.

Azure and Windows are where things start to get bad with Microsoft.

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gerdesj ◴[25 Jun 25 22:16 UTC] No.44382293[source]▶
"There aren't many things like .NET, MSSQL and Visual Studio out there. The debugger experience in VS is the holy grail if you have super nasty real world technology situations. There's a reason every AAA game engine depends on it in some way."

I'm not interested in AAA games engines writing and nor is most of the world. If that is it, then you have damned MS with (very) faint praise.

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1. privatelypublic ◴[25 Jun 25 22:34 UTC] No.44382385[source]▶
I think you misunderstand- game engines are complex beasts and visual studio and/or .Net (in any of its incarnations) have the best debugging workflow I've seen.

Typescript is also Microsoft. So is ONNX.

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2. gerdesj ◴[25 Jun 25 22:55 UTC] No.44382551[source]▶
"I think you misunderstand- game engines are complex beasts and visual studio and/or .Net (in any of its incarnations) have the best debugging workflow I've seen."

I think you misunderstand: the market, ie the number of people who actually care about developing game engines, is tiny.

How many games developers do you know as a subset of the people you know of?

OP only managed to find a niche product area for MS to shine in and maintain traction - the moat thing. Nothing else apparently.

I for one would not miss MS one jot. I wasted so much time with things like autoexec.bat and config.sys back in the day. I got good at it - Novell gave me a T shirt on Cool Solutions for a boot floppy image that managed to try several popular NIC drivers (3c595, 3c905, 3c509, ne1000 and a few others) and get you to a network connection for imaging or whatever. Later on I get to ignore SFC /SCANNOW answers to searches. Do you remember WINS? What about the horror of time sync? The PDC emulator FSMO role is basically a NT domain controller. AD was a bodge from day one, tacked onto ...

Sorry, got carried away there.

Again, Typescript is cared about by whom and what on earth is ONNX?

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3. AppleBananaPie ◴[25 Jun 25 23:08 UTC] No.44382643[source]▶
A game engine is often an example of a 'complex beast'.

No one is arguing that developing game engines specifically is common.

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4. privatelypublic ◴[26 Jun 25 00:47 UTC] No.44383201{3}[source]▶
Thanks for trying to expound on my expounding on the original. But, the response indicates they don't know and actively avoid learning. Thus, nothing would change their mind.

PS: to throw some shade- I'm surprised they didn't (mis)spell it M$- after all everything they mentioned is making me nostalgic for phpBB based tech forums in 2004.

5. giancarlostoro ◴[26 Jun 25 05:42 UTC] No.44384493[source]▶
ONNX is a format that allows you to run AI models without Python in any language that implements ONNX, there's even an ONNX implementation in Go, meaning you can churn out even more performance out of AI models and waste drastically less resources (Go, Rust, C++, Zig, C, D etc could be used to squeeze performance). Think of it how Java produces a JAR file, well an ONNX file is a file that could be run by any runtime built for it. Another reasonable analogy would be WebAssembly, but to a degree.
6. boolit ◴[26 Jun 25 05:42 UTC] No.44384499[source]▶
Typescript is used by web developers over the world and ONNX for deploying deep neural networks. Two huge markets.
7. ruszki ◴[26 Jun 25 07:10 UTC] No.44384967[source]▶
What makes it better than say IntelliJ? Is there some feature which helps you more with debugging?
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8. dagw ◴[26 Jun 25 08:25 UTC] No.44385350[source]▶
It's been a few years since I've used Visual Studio, but for longest time its support for debugging multithreaded and GPU code was unmatched. This is one of the main reasons game developers loved VS. It also had good support for mixed language debugging which is very useful when your C# code calls a C++ library for example.
9. ◴[26 Jun 25 08:32 UTC] No.44385394[source]▶
10. OrderlyTiamat ◴[26 Jun 25 13:47 UTC] No.44387382[source]▶
So are LSPs- which by now are everywhere, they're a huge leap forward over previous implementations in (n)vim and emacs imho.