Top all-time · #5459
Jackson Dunstan
Personal blog · jacksondunstan.com/articlesprogramminggames
Jackson Dunstan writes JacksonDunstan.com, a personal blog at jacksondunstan.com about programming and games. Since 2010, 14 different Hacker News readers have linked it 17 times, most often “C++ for C# Developers”. The last post was in 2021, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (9) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Jackson Dunstan's blog on C# and Unity performance: struct and heap behaviour, Unity runtimes, benchmarks, and a C++ for C# developers series.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 9 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
JacksonDunstan.com covers game programming
Most-linked posts?
- C++ for C# Developers2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-04-24
What Hacker News says?
Finding any information on "Pure Code" setups for unity is impossible. As in, I think http://jacksondunstan.com/ has the only article on the internet.
Comment linking /
on “Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive”Submitted C++ for C# Developers as a story · 30 points
HN discussionWas `Coordinate` a class or a struct? C# structs generally [0][1] don't force use of the garbage-collected heap. [0] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ericlippert/2010/09/30/the-... (ignore the usual comments telling the reader they are wrong for wondering about whether the garbage-collected heap is used) [1] https://jacksondunstan.com/articles/3453
Comment linking /articles/3453
on “Slow Software”Submitted Flash vs. HTML5: Bitmap Drawing Speed as a story · 3 points
HN discussionUnity has literally the worst implementation of C# out there right now. Not only is it running Mono instead of .NET (Core) but it's also not even using Mono's generational GC (SGen). They have been working on switching from Mono to .NET for years now because Mono isn't being updated to support newer C# versions but it will also be a significant performance boost, according to one of the Unity developers in this area…
Comment linking /articles/4702
on “A comparison of Rust’s borrow checker to the one in C#”Submitted Unity3d C++ Scripting as a story · 2 points
HN discussionBurst is an impressive piece of tech but it really only exists because both Mono and IL2CPP are shockingly slow. Mike Acton worked under DOTS which is the only place you'd actually see the benefits of Burst. The 99% (or more) of Unity games not using DOTS can barely use it because of its limitations. They are left to suffer with poor performance. If you haven't seen it before you should check out the kind of code IL…
Comment linking /articles/4533
on “Unity reintroduces the Runtime Fee through its Industry license”Submitted How to Write Faster Code Than 90% of Programmers as a story · 2 points
HN discussionUnity made tons of strange decisions over its lifetime. Like first, they picked .NET and it's Mono implementation, which wasn't as fast as the original one, but was decent - then they kicked up some stink with the Mono devs, leading to them shipping a Mono version that was at a point a decade out of date, and performed way worse than either Mono and .NET. Their first idea was, instead of updating Mono, what if they…
Comment linking /articles/4654
on “20 Years of .NET”Submitted ASC 2.0 Conditionals Performance as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIt's worth mentioning that there's now a third way C# is utilised in Unity which is via their new 'Burst' compiler, part of their wider move to an Entity Component System they've called DOTS[1]. It supports a subset of C# that gets compiled into memory safe jobs that can run safely on and spread across different threads. I'm using the Burst compiler + jobs in my full-time game project and the performance is seriousl…
Comment linking /articles/5251
on “Twenty years of C# with Anders Hejlsberg [audio]”Senior doesn't need to learn about loops, ifs and so on For example when learning C++ while being proficient at C# I found useful this blog: https://www.jacksondunstan.com/articles/5530 "C++ For C# Developers: Part 1 – Introduction" Author compares features between C# and C++ and shows what is similar, the same, different, non-existent, etc.
Comment linking /articles/5530
on “Ask HN: Platform for senior devs to learn other programming languages?”Nice benchmarking on Microsoft .Net CLR. Looks like the JIT compiler is smart enough to recognize that array.Length is an invariant and hoist it out of the loop, which is awesome for the common use cases! One nitpick about the title: C# runs on more runtimes than Microsoft .Net CLR, and those may behave very differently. For example: Mono CLR, or Unity's IL2CPP which is an ahead-of-time compiler. Specifically, I'd e…
Comment linking /articles/4749
on “Should array length be stored into a local variable in C#?”You may like these AS3/Browser JS benchmarks: http://jacksondunstan.com/articles/712
Comment linking /articles/712
on “Missile Command in less than 1k of JavaScript”> Well, I suppose my point is that Flash doesn't perform... I think my counter question is then "doesn't perform compared to what?" Compared to a natively compiled piece of software written in C or ASM? Yeah, it doesn't perform well at all. Compared to Java? I'd say modern Java runtimes are faster in general. Compared to Javascript? I'd like to see some benchmarks with modern runtimes like v8, but I'd wager that Fla…
Comment linking /articles/534
on “Adobe: Same code on five screens”
