[libre-riscv-dev] Vulkanizing

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Wed, Feb 19, 2020 at 11:35 PM Scheming Pony
<scheming-pony at protonmail.com> wrote:
>
> We are now getting back to philosophy and arguments--that is another Circus skit.

oh good - you noticed :)

> My philosophy is that hacking cool stuff is great, but to move
> forward our society needs to get back to engineering, basic principles,

... and to apply the Hippocratic Oath to it...

> and yes, "Why?"  Think about the 737 Max, for reflection on this idea.

indeed.

> We need painters and hackers and marketers, but we desperately need good, hardcore engineering.  When I see a great big pile of cruft made by musty decisions coming at me in the windscreen--I pull the eject handle.

unfortunately, at this extremely early stage, we haven't got time - or
money - to go "let's do this perfectly, from day one, by thinking
through absolutely everything, then spend the next 20 years developing
it".

this project is VERY specifically, "how can we get SOMETHING working
in the fastest amount of time possible with the minimum effort on our
part possible that has the maximum based covered as possible with
acceptable performance that is also flexible enough to reach other
markets in the future".

on TOP of that, ONCE it is achieved, we go "okay, now what can we do
better *in an INCREMENTAL* fashion".

so - very nice, GLSL, very nice OpenGL 3.1, very nice Verjo: all for
later.  NOT right now.  right now we FOCUS on getting the FIRST
iteration of the core hardware done, the FIRST shader engines that
will maximise the reach of what we're doing.

Vulkan reaches dozens of different markets due to the compatibility
layers: OpenGL does not.

Varjo is probably very nice... but if it's not SPIR-V then it has to
be *made* into SPIR-V, because SPIR-V is what Vulkan is based on, and
Vulkan is what the markets accept right now.


> The great thing here is that our ideas are compatible.  Our world needs to join hands and fight for freedom.  Being here has focused me on my work, which is just that most of the time.

cool.

> No more philosophy discussion for me.  They threw me out of Columbia after they found me sitting in the Asian studies library reading about Eastern philosophy.  I thought I was there to read.

you were definitely in the wrong university.  Oxford, Cambridge or
Imperial College would never have done that.

l.