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

These days, you get a medium-level description and a Linux driver of questionable quality. Part of this is just laziness, but mostly this is a function of complexity. Modern hardware is just so complicated it would take a long time to completely document, and even longer to write a driver for.

That's what's claimed. That's what people say, yet it's just an excuse. I've heard the same sort of excuse people have, after they write a massive codebase, then say "Oops, sorry, didn't get around to documenting it".

And no, hardware is not more difficult than software to document.

If the system is complex, there's more need to document, just as with a huge codebase. On their end, they have new employees to train up, and they have to manage testing. So any excuse that silicon vendors have to deal with such immense complexity? My violin plays for them.

That's obviously the wrong message. They should say "Go ask the engineering VP to get us off any other projects for another cycle while we're writing 'satisfying' documentation".

Extensive documentation comes at a price few companies are willing to pay (and that's not just a matter of resources. Look at Apple's documentation)

    > Look at Apple's documentation