Interesting. My experience is that bulky abstraction layers are harder to maintain than own software.
In game development, whenever we go with highly abstract middleware, it always ends up limiting us in what we can do, at what level of performance, how much we can steer it towards our hardware targets, and similar. Moreover, when teams become so lean that they can only do high level programming and something breaks close to the metal, I’ve seen even “senior” programmers in the AAA industry flail around with no idea how to debug it, and no skills to understand the low level code.
I’ve seen gameplay programmers who don’t understand RAII and graphics programmers who don’t know how to draw a shape with OpenGL. Those are examples of core discipline knowledge lost in the games industry. Aka what we have now, we might not know anymore how to build from scratch. Or at least most software engineers in the industry wouldn’t. It cannot end well.
Building your own in my exp is a better idea — then you can at least always steer it, improve and evolve it, and fix it. And you don’t accidentally build companies with knowledge a mile wide and an inch deep, which genuinely cannot ship innovative products (technically it is impossible).
In game development, whenever we go with highly abstract middleware, it always ends up limiting us in what we can do, at what level of performance, how much we can steer it towards our hardware targets, and similar. Moreover, when teams become so lean that they can only do high level programming and something breaks close to the metal, I’ve seen even “senior” programmers in the AAA industry flail around with no idea how to debug it, and no skills to understand the low level code.
I’ve seen gameplay programmers who don’t understand RAII and graphics programmers who don’t know how to draw a shape with OpenGL. Those are examples of core discipline knowledge lost in the games industry. Aka what we have now, we might not know anymore how to build from scratch. Or at least most software engineers in the industry wouldn’t. It cannot end well.
Building your own in my exp is a better idea — then you can at least always steer it, improve and evolve it, and fix it. And you don’t accidentally build companies with knowledge a mile wide and an inch deep, which genuinely cannot ship innovative products (technically it is impossible).