It’s far from being impossible, the main thing you need is free time and obsession (and money for your free time btw).
C or asm are not obscure languages or anything, they are brutal languages where you have to trace runtime from A to Z, and manage the memory.
In 1990, it was absolutely normal to code in C. Yes you had to decode images yourself, yes you had to decode audio, yes you had to raytrace, etc.
“Wait, you had to calculate all of these by hand ?
Yes my friend everybody had to do that in my time, what else could we do ?
So we took books, and did one by one.
This was the norm, just that it became some sort of archeology.”
Every year, thousands of 19-year-olds complete these tasks in low-level schools like Epita/Epita/42 or in demoscene contests. They aren't geniuses; they are just students who were forced to read the manual and understand how the computer actually works.
Free time won’t guarantee you success, but free time + obsession will (like Terry Davis).
Really, this is not alien tech.
Before FFmpeg, people had to encode the videos. Before emulators someone had to create the state machine, etc. All these people it would be insane to ignore them.
Most of the difficult problems have shifted somewhere else from low-level.
How to simulate millions of pharmaceutical molecules in short amount of time ?
How to simulate the world in GTA VI ?
Saving 2 bytes of memory by writing asm (that… won’t be portable) is not the thing going to save you. The problems are now elsewhere.
The problem now is not about “wow you read ancient manuals and mixed sand with water and got a solid foundational brick” but it is about “ok, using these bricks, how to build a skyscraper that is 1km tall”.
No doubt that these modern programmers are as good as the archeologists who like to explore handcrafted code.
alt Hacker News
It’s far from being impossible, the main thing you need is free time and obsession (and money for your free time btw).
C or asm are not obscure languages or anything, they are brutal languages where you have to trace runtime from A to Z, and manage the memory.
In 1990, it was absolutely normal to code in C. Yes you had to decode images yourself, yes you had to decode audio, yes you had to raytrace, etc.
“Wait, you had to calculate all of these by hand ?
Yes my friend everybody had to do that in my time, what else could we do ?
So we took books, and did one by one.
This was the norm, just that it became some sort of archeology.”
Every year, thousands of 19-year-olds complete these tasks in low-level schools like Epita/Epita/42 or in demoscene contests. They aren't geniuses; they are just students who were forced to read the manual and understand how the computer actually works.
Free time won’t guarantee you success, but free time + obsession will (like Terry Davis).
Really, this is not alien tech.
Before FFmpeg, people had to encode the videos. Before emulators someone had to create the state machine, etc. All these people it would be insane to ignore them.
Most of the difficult problems have shifted somewhere else from low-level.
How to simulate millions of pharmaceutical molecules in short amount of time ?
How to simulate the world in GTA VI ?
Saving 2 bytes of memory by writing asm (that… won’t be portable) is not the thing going to save you. The problems are now elsewhere.
The problem now is not about “wow you read ancient manuals and mixed sand with water and got a solid foundational brick” but it is about “ok, using these bricks, how to build a skyscraper that is 1km tall”.
No doubt that these modern programmers are as good as the archeologists who like to explore handcrafted code.