OT: Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years

[GrimMaple]

On Monday, 29 April 2024 at 03:51:09 UTC, Bruce Carneal wrote:

> If they're silent how do you know they failed?  Also, if you 
> *do* know they failed why would NaN be unhelpful in localizing 
> the problem?  It could be initialization, or it could be 
> something else along the way.

Having a game made in D, NaN is my #1 pain to deal with during 
graphics development. In other Langs, if I mess up some code, I 
usually get a picture that is wrong. A wrong colour, wrong 
position on screen, etc. With NaN, all rendering pipeline 
silently fails if even a single number was uninitialised 
somewhere. So I can't even take a guess at what number exactly 
was not initialised, I have to run a debugger and start from the 
beginning to see where it went wrong. If floats initialize to 0, 
you can usually guess what was forgotten because you know the 
math.

> OTOH, NaNs can be very helpful when trying to track down FP 
> problems, with improper (unthinking) initialization probably 
> near the top of the list.

NaN was literally never helpful to me, because it removes 
indirect information from that allows me to take a guess. If you 
know what kind of math you're doing, you can usually assume where 
the code went wrong depending on the result you get. With NaNs, 
you only get one part of this information.