EA Standard Template Library VS PSRayTracing

> you can still use it with smart pointers provided by any other library

Is the point of having a kitchen-sink library like this not that you dont have to reach for a 3rdparty library for things that you need 'all the time'?

Certainly, not everyone needs it.

...but, not everyone needs threads either. Not everyone needs an http server; and yet, if you have an application framework that provides them, when you do need them, it saves you reaching for yet-another-dependency.

Was that no the point from the beginning?

unique_ptr is a fundamental primitive for many, as you see from some other frameworks (1), and implementation is not always either a) trivial, or b) as simple as 'just use std::unique_ptr'.

This does seem like a very opinionated decision with reasonably unclear justification.

[1] - eg. https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/blob/release/Engin..., https://github.com/electronicarts/EASTL/blob/master/include/...

Can I introduce you to EASTL

For games focused stuff have a look at EASTL https://github.com/electronicarts/EASTL also perhaps some of the Data Oriented Design stuff (see Mike Acton's CPP Con Talks). This also have loads of good stuff https://www.dataorienteddesign.com/dodbook/

C++, but generally treat it as C. STL is pretty slow while debugging so we avoid it and write our own replacements. If you don't want to drive that deep use something like EASTL: https://github.com/electronicarts/EASTL

In my experience game devs don't eschew the STL because of compile times, but because (a) its memory management is not sufficiently tunable and (b) it uses exceptions heavily which many game engines disable entirely due to perceived performance problems. For this reason, some of the engines I've worked on have used their own forks of the STL in the spirit of EASTL to rectify these issues. Others like my current project just don't use the STL at all (outside of some third-party library code) and use custom libraries for everything.

In my opinion, you should also benchmark it against something like boost::container::flat_set or eastl::vector_set and you should expect the same performance as with your ordered functionality. Another interesting idea for organization of such flat and sorted container can be found here.

finally, if you're worried about performance (a lot of aspiring game programmers seem to be, even though for anything but high-end engines the STL is likely fine if you know what you're doing..) you could look into the EA STL or other STL replacements..

check it out: https://github.com/electronicarts/EASTL

I just took a look at their atomic.h and wow, "well-documented" is an understatement !

I wouldn't say that CMake isn't that painful for the deployment stage. I have successfully deployed an open source project on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS.

It's a very old project and a VERY basic engine. TBH, engines like godot do a much better job, have their own scripting language (to hide away C++), but still let you write some native code if need be. For TeaScript, I'd be more interested in using it to have a more dynamic pipeline for this project, but performance there is absolutely critical since it can mean the difference between 2 minutes an 2 hours.

Does it work as a drop-in replacement? I've got this project here where I'm looking to squeeze more perf from: https://github.com/define-private-public/PSRayTracing

While working on a ray tracing implementation, I was interested in replacing out the usage of std::shared_ptr with something else. I've always been told that shared pointers are slow, and this is due to things such as reference counting. The original implementation of this ray tracer used shared pointers quite extensively in the rendering (hot path) code. I didn't want to deviate from the architecture for my implementaiton . Mostly, the pointers are passed around as const-ref objects.

Last year I was working on an implementation of the Ray Tracing in one Weekend book series. I noticed there was a fair amount of sub-optimal code in it, so I took the opportunity to rewrite parts of it to be better optimized. One of the other things I added to the CMake configuration were some compile time flags that could be toggled ON/OFF, as to use either the books code, or my code. e.g. WITH_BOOK_AABB_HIT=True, it would use the books' method AABB-Ray intersection. False, it would use my (faster) one. This allowed anyone else to download the code, toggle the change and easily see the effect it had on performance.

Here's my implementation: https://github.com/define-private-public/PSRayTracing It's different, mainly in structure (cleaner) and that it's much more performant. It also allows you to either use the code I wrote (typically faster) or the book's methods with the flip of a compiler flag.