Top all-time · #4423
A journey into a wild pointer
Personal blog · carette.xyzprogrammingsystems
A journey into a wild pointer is a personal blog at carette.xyz about programming and systems. Since 2019, 17 different Hacker News readers have linked it 70 times, most often “The state of Vulkan apps in 2024”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-25, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (8) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
A graphics programming blog with posts on Vulkan adoption, Metal, the state of the graphics world, and Rust zero-cost abstractions. HN commenters cite it as support for those points.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 8 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- The state of Vulkan apps in 20244 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2024-05-29
- A Story of Screwdriver Drivers3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2026-07-05
- Zero-Cost Abstractions in Rust3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-02-08
- Testing the Swift C compatibility with Raylib (+WASM)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-03-22
- The CEO Cost Function3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-01-02
- Swift C++ Interoperability in Practice: Raylib and Dear ImGui2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2026-03-26
- Learning to Learn, in the Age of LLMs2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2025-06-17
- About the "Trust-Me-Bro" Culture2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-01-06
- The terrible situation of Windows laptops (2024)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-05-19
- State of Vulkan Since 20152 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-05-29
What Hacker News says?
I'm not in the graphics world at all, but I read this lively discussion last week (post [0], discussion [1]) that made me think the situation was pretty messy. Is it maybe not as bad as that makes it appear? [0] https://www.carette.xyz/posts/we_are_doomed/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38994780
Comment linking /posts/we_are_doomed/
on “Zed, a collaborative code editor, is now open source”Submitted Lobbying is corruption as a story · 528 points
HN discussion> ...games? Isn't that what we're talking about? I'm struggling to remember when Apple last truly cared about gaming on Macs > How Apple suffers from spurning the gaming industry Ah yes. Apple truly deeply suffers. In which reality? > Oh, well this is just wrong. Box86 had "solved" the x86 -> ARM translation path before Apple Silicon even existed, albeit slowly 1. No idea what Box86 is 2. Slowly means it didn't solv…
Comment linking /posts/state_of_vulkan_2024/
on “Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month”Submitted The skill of the future is not 'AI', but 'Focus' as a story · 184 points
HN discussionYou're missing that people don't care about Vulkan at all: https://carette.xyz/posts/state_of_vulkan_2024/ And the translation layer exists largely due to Valve business decisions, not because "community came together or something". This glorious amazing support didn't even really exist until 2018 (when it was launched with official support of 27 games) 1. Apple has never truly cared about gaming on the Mac 2. iOS o…
Comment linking /posts/state_of_vulkan_2024/
on “Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month”Submitted Good people refuse to do bad things as a story · 144 points
HN discussion> Metal was released in June 2014[0], and Vulkan development started a month later, in July 2014[1]. > > You can interpret that in a few different ways There are no two interpretations. Metal was released before Khronos even had their "kick off meeting". The official introduction of Khronos didn't happen until 2015. Vulkan 1.0 was released in 2016 . Prior to 2014 there was no Vulkan, and no idea of Vulkan. Sevral co…
Comment linking /posts/state_of_vulkan_2024/
on “Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month”Submitted A minimal kernel in Swift, running in QEMU as a story · 109 points
HN discussionSupporting a different 3D API is really not the complicated or time consuming part of porting a game to another platform, especially when the target API is Metal. The poor game support on macOS is a mix of Apple apathy towards gaming and the low potential sales numbers. Also, of the few new Vulkan apps being released (a whopping 9 in 2023), most actually only support a single platform: https://carette.xyz/posts/stat…
Comment linking /posts/state_of_vulkan_2024/
on “Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month”Submitted We Are Doomed: A pessimistic point of view of "modern software engineering" as a story · 55 points
HN discussion> The number of games that run natively on Vulkan is negligible. Yep, that's unfortunately true... https://www.carette.xyz/posts/state_of_vulkan_2024/
Comment linking /posts/state_of_vulkan_2024/
on “Vulkan1.3 on the M1 in one month”Submitted Who will buy your services if you fire us all? as a story · 27 points
HN discussion> the refusal to natively support Vulkan in favor of Metal 1. Metal precedes Vulkan 2. Hardly anyone supports Vulkan https://www.carette.xyz/posts/state_of_vulkan_2024/
Comment linking /posts/state_of_vulkan_2024/
on “Blurry rendering of games on Mac”Submitted The disastrous communication from Apple to apps developers as a story · 27 points
HN discussionWhy is it that every one of these anti-AI screeds that gets upvoted on HN has been clearly written by AI? Here is one of his posts from 2022: "Since a long time now I was interested in learning computer graphics and “do stuff” with computer graphics APIs. I began to work on a very simple Game engine in Swift / Metal last year but I began to switch to a Windows machine a few months ago, and Swift / Metal is not compa…
Comment linking /posts/opengl_and_cpp_on_m1_mac/
on “Good people refuse to do bad things”Submitted The state of Vulkan apps in 2024 as a story · 23 points
HN discussionYour "run-time" code with iterators vs with a hand made for loop tends to result in the same set of instructions. Often the iterator usage will also enable optimizations that make the loop faster. * https://github.com/mike-barber/rust-zero-cost-abstractions * https://carette.xyz/posts/zero_cost_abstraction/ * https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2016/11/30/zero-cost-abstractio...
Comment linking /posts/zero_cost_abstraction/
on “Formally Verifying Rust's Opaque Types”Submitted The screwdriver test, or What separates real engineers from the rest as a story · 6 points
HN discussionThe cost of Rust's abstractions are largely at compile time, not at runtime. For example, see https://idursun.com/posts/rust_zero_cost_abstractions_in_act... or https://carette.xyz/posts/zero_cost_abstraction/ .
Comment linking /posts/zero_cost_abstraction/
on “C Is the Greenest Programming Language”Submitted A Story of Screwdriver Drivers as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted The terrible situation of Windows laptops (2024) as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted What 'Getting Your Hands Dirty' Means at LLM-Era as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Swift C++ Interoperability in Practice: Raylib and Dear ImGui as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted An exploration of playing three generations of windows games on macOS as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Terrible Situation of Windows (Professional) Laptops as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted AI Stance Is Not Binary as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted By Necessity: The Return of the Engineer as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Made (By Humans) in California as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted The CEO Cost Function as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Do you trust your FOSS? (2021) as a story · 4 points
HN discussion
