John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

I have mixed feelings about this. In one part, JC is someone I look up to, at least from the perspective of engineering. On the other hand, putting myself in the shoes in someone who got the once in life chance to build a new OS with corp support for a new shiny device…I for hell would want to do this.

Exactly! It seems very narc-y. Just let me build my cool waste of company resources, it's not like Zucky is going to notice, he's too busy building his 11 homes.

Imagine being able to build an operating system, basically the end-game of being a programmer, and get PAID for it. Then some nerd tells on you.

I'm not sure if you are trying to be /s, but yeah that's basically what I'm trying to say. Definitely better than working on those recommendation systems.

Damn, I'd pay to work in some serious OS/Compiler teams, but hey why should they hire me? Oh well...Yeah I'm doing a bit of projects on my side but man I'm so burnt out by my 9am-5pm $$ job + 5pm-10pm kid job that I barely have any large chunk of time to work on those.

Not sarcastic at all. I'm in the same boat. I've been trying to get into contributing to Redox, but at the end of the work day when the kid is finally asleep it's hard to motivate.

I get it man. It’s really tough. How old is your kid? Mine is a 5 years old boy and he doesn’t seem to need a lot of sleep but a huge amount of companionship which really bugs me out.

In theory, it’s better to sleep early, get up around 5 and get 2 hours of quality time, but man he sometimes gets up around 6:15 and earlier, and I found it difficult to get good sleep anyway, so I tried to switch to 2 hours of night time, but he wants to sleep with me for 30 mins around 9pm before going to my wife’s bed, and I usually fell sleep sooner than he did…

Girls are much easier to raise. They sleep earlier and don’t fight too much, as far as I heard from friends.

I actually have some ideas about this kind of situation, drop me a line, email in my profile!

I got the chance to do this at Microsoft, it is indeed awesome! Thankfully the (multiple!) legendary programmers on the team were all behind the effort.

Anyway, if anyone reading this gets a chance to build a custom OS for bespoke HW, and get paid FAANG salary to do so, go for it! :-D

Reading on from that he says:

> If the platform really needs to watch every cycle that tightly, you aren't going to be a general purpose platform, and you might as well just make a monolithic C++ embedded application, rather than a whole new platform that is very likely to have a low shelf life as the hardware platform evolves.

Which I think is agreeable, up to a certain point, because I think it's potentially naive. That monolithic C++ embedded application is going to be fundamentally built out of a scheduler, IO and driver interfaces, and a shell. That's the only sane way to do something like this. And that's an operating system.

Look at the outcome of Meta's performance in AR/VR over the past few years: a fortune has been spent; relatively little has been achieved; the whole thing is likely about to be slashed back; VR, something Carmack believes in, remains a bit commercially marginal and easily dismissed; and Carmack's own reputation has taken a hit from association with it all. You can understand perfectly well why he doesn't feel that it would have been harmless to just let other people have whatever fun they wanted with the AR/VR Zuckbucks.

(Mind you, Carmack himself was responsible for Oculus' Scheme-based VRScript exploratory-programming environment, another Meta-funded passion project that didn't end up going far. It surely didn't cost remotely as much as XROS though.)

Yup. This is how bloat is created.

If you want to do it you should be able to defend it against contrarian arguments that it’s a waste of time and company resources.

Carmack saw it as a waste of time. Is this really what we are doing now? Justifying that my waste of company resources is no less inefficient than the others?

> They sleep earlier and don’t fight too much, as far as I heard from friends.

Definitely depends on the specific children!

I'm now a post kids greybeard; two nats, two steps, both flavours. Yes, girls under 10 are easier than boys. That flips on you in the teen years!

It's insane how VR has succeeded beyond most people's wildest dreams on the hardware front (all that hardware that goes into a VR headset either sounded like science fiction or seemed like would be exotic stuff costing tens of thousands of dollars), and the software also had standout successes, but it kinda just petered out both in the entertainment and professional realms.

>That monolithic C++ embedded application is going to be fundamentally built out of a scheduler, IO and driver interfaces, and a shell. That's the only sane way to do something like this. And that's an operating system.

Exactly! I picture the choice being grandfathering in compatibility with existing OSes (having the promised performance of their product in fact indirectly modulated by the output of all other teams of world's smartest throughout computing history and present day), vs wringing another OS-sized piece of C++ tech debt upon unsuspecting humanity. In which case I am thankful to Carmack for making the call.

I can understand how "what you're doing is fundamentally pointless" is something they can only afford to hear from someone who already has their degree of magnitude of fuck-you money. Furthermore in a VC-shaped culture it can also be a statement that's to many people fundamentally incomprehensible

That sounds scary…I don’t know how to communicate with teenage boys. I had a lot of quarrels with my parents back then.

I guess so. But the sample size is over 10, although not statistically significant but definitely something.

Is it really that successful? I think the wildest dream is that everyone is using it but I don’t really see it happening anytime soon in the future.

I meant success in the technical sense - they managed to get the tech as good as it could realistically get - and cheap too.

But it turned out nobody cared. People who envisioned doctors using VR glasses to look at MR images in 3D, architects, modelers, mechanical engineers, who people thought would use 3D to do work turned out to not want it.

Immersive games were created, that looked and ran amazing, and afforded a never-before-seen level of interactivity, but after a few standout successes, people just moved on.

It's like Apple got to about the iPhone 4 level (where most people would agree the experience was decent), then everybody decided to go back to their old Nokias.