wolf3d VS MS-DOS

There are far better historical sources to study, such as Wolf3D, the classic BSD games, or even Word 1.1.

It took a long time to write that engine and porting the whole thing properly also takes time. It just moves goalposts. Why didn’t he spend 80M on a new AAA game? If he spent any less than that, he certainly can’t draw any useful conclusions.

Have you ever looked over the codebase? It’s plenty large enough to draw useful conclusions from for most people let alone someone with his vast game experience.

https://github.com/id-Software/wolf3d/tree/master/WOLFSRC

Meanwhile, you are drawing bay conclusions with no credentials out evidence. As to actual games, setting aside the fact that Wolfenstein still sees play, loads of popular games are written in JS. Lots of others are in Java or C#. None of these make your case as Haskell, Ocaml, and StandardML (SML) are in the same performance range.

As to your argument about the efficiency of objects, what do you think functional languages use? Lets use SML as an example. There’s real arrays and they are also optionally mutable (yes, there’s linked lists too, but those can be used in C++ too).

Records are basically just C structs (they are immutable by default, but can contain refs which are mutable pointers). They can contain functions because functions are first class without the mess that many languages create.

You associate functions with datatypes which gives you the best part about methods. They also give you a kind of implicit interface too due to structural typing. I’d note that closures are mathematically equivalent to objects.

Finally, modules are everything a language like Java tries to get from classes (and more), but without any of the downsides of classes themselves.

People generally like the JS paradigm of factories and object literals (even if they hate the stuff like dynamic typing or type coercion). StandardML offers the same kinds of patterns, but with sound typing, simpler syntax without the warts, more powerful syntax, and performance in the same range as go or Java.

To me, your argument sounds like the people arguing that goto is better and more natural than looping constructs or the procedural guys arguing against OOP. I think if you messed around with StandardML, it would change your mind about what programming could be in the future.

I'm not used to seeing assembly look like this. What's the wrapper stuff? Looks like C. But I thought you could inline assembly in C like here: https://github.com/id-Software/wolf3d/blob/master/WOLFSRC/DETECT.C

c) The source code was pretty vanilla standard C. No huge assembly. Around 36000 lines of "normal C" (at the time, most of C games were non-portable, you would get near and far pointers or assembly shenanigans you had in Wolf3d source). Only 4 assembly functions (draw a vertical line, a horizontal one, fixed point multiplication and division), and they were already replaced by 4 standard C functions.

id software used raycasting since it's early games like Hovertank 3D, Catacomb 3D and Wolfenstein 3D. heck, even though Doom, Duke Nukem 3D and Blood were majorly using BSP, their most simple and rustic rendering base was through raycasting.

This 4.0 code contains references to 4.00, though: https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/main/v4.0/src/BOOT/...

I recently stumbled across the MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0 source code [1].

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS

“Despite this reduction in scope for MS-DOS 2.0, it did carry many bits of XENIX. The system adopted I/O redirection via less-than and greater-than symbols, piping, a hierarchical directory tree, file handles […]”

The source code for MSDOS 2 is available and the file descriptor stuff appears to be in https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/master/v2.0/source/... and XENIX2.ASM. It stands in contrast to the File Control Block API which MSDOS 1 (née 86-DOS) modeled after CP/M’s API.

Asynchronous I/O figures in prominently in Windows NT. I was really surprised to see[0]:

Each driver in the chain defines two entry points; the strategy routine and the interrupt routine. The 2.0 DOS does not really make use of two entry points (it simply calls strategy, then immediately calls interrupt). This dual entry point scheme is designed to facilitate future multi-tasking versions of MS-DOS. In multi-tasking environments I/O must be asynchronous, to accomplish this the strategy routine will be called to queue (internally) a request and return quickly. It is then the responsibility of the interrupt routine to perform the actual I/O at interrupt time by picking requests off the internal queue (set up by the strategy routine), and process them. When a request is complete, it is flagged as "done" by the interrupt routine. The DOS periodically scans the list of requests looking for ones flagged as done, and "wakes up" the process waiting for the completion of the request.

I didn't realize that kind of forwarding-looking perspective was going into the design of MS-DOS.

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/master/v2.0/source/...

>Any others I'm missing?

I would suggest MS-DOS: https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS