alt Hacker News>they did absolutely zero benchmarking beforehand, just went with industry haresay, a
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence
It was a real issue in the past with hard drives and small media assets. It's still a real issue even with SSDs. HDD/SSD IOPS are still way slower than contiguous reads when you're dealing with a massive amount of files.
At the end of the day it requires testing which requires time at a time you don't have a lot of time.
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imtringued • yesterday at 4:04 PM
It's not an issue with asynchronous filesystem IO. Again, async file IO should be the default for game engines. It doesn't take a genius to gather a list of assets to load and then wait for the whole list to finish rather than blocking on every tiny file.
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This is not a good invokation of Chesterton's Fence.
The Fence is a parable about understanding something that already exists before asking to remove it. If you cannot explain why it exists, you shouldn't ask to remove it.
In this case, it wasn't something that already existed in their game. It was something that they read, then followed (without truly understanding whether it applied to their game), and upon re-testing some time later, realized it wasn't needed and caused detrimental side-effects. So it's not Chesterton's Fence.
You could argue they followed a videogame industry practice to make a new product, which is reasonable. They just didn't question or test their assumptions that they were within the parameters of said industry practice.
I don't think it's a terrible sin, mind you. We all take shortcuts sometimes.