Re: [AD] Focusing on priorities and the philosophy behind our constributions (was: malloc)

[aj <aj@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I use allegro, because i can do stuff with it.  Its good.  I have not 
seen anything else like it.
It has the right balance between low and high level, that allows for 
sloppy/fast/rapid development... or the opposite.
I can "get down and dirty" with bits of it if i really have to, and i 
can rely on it to be stable, useful, and most of all predictable.
It has value, its not trying too hard to impress anyone with todays 
buzzword feature list.. instead it does everything it claims.
How many libraries of allegros class can you say have as many features, 
and are as solid ?
I use allegro as the basis for an application that gets used everyweek.  
Last night i used it infront of 1000 people for over 6 hours, and had to 
rely on it to work flawlessly on an AMD64 CPU running 80% cpu usage for 
6hrs.. and i had not a single glitch.  THAT IS THE REASON I USE ALLEGRO.

I've also used it at shows with 50,000+ people.. stadiums... fuck-off 
screens; world-famous music acts... allegro was serving me flawlessly.
running for several hours at a time, often for over 6hrs.

Im still here because allegro has value, good value.

Why do i do any of it for free?    Allegro is too much work for one 
person, thats why we all work on it...  but we are not all working on it 
for the same reasons; we aren't working towards the same goals; thats 
obvious, everyone has their own tangents, most of the people that have 
been around the longest (i've been around since pre '98) are the ones 
that have there tangents all in fairly much the same direction, thats 
why its still being developed.   There is no greater good, there is no 
servering the interests of game developers crown to be won.  Thats all 
BS.  The sooner that talk stops the better.
If your talking about free as in $0, then what i said makes even more 
sense.  No one really cares too much for money, we have genuine interest.

As far as what i want, and how insignificant it is, in many peoples eyes 
it probably is insignificant, but not to me.
It was an arrogant statement for me to make "might even drag it into 
this century".   if you took allegro 420 and went back in time to '99 
would it compile ? most likely it would.
The current standard for your average PC gamer is an SSE enabled CPU... 
so why are we still not allowing SSE code to be developed ?  SSE stuff 
should have been considered a while ago, to be even considering it as a 
'new' development means we are way behind the current trends.
(thank you Peter for making progress in the past 2 days).

>> How about your contributions AJ? How many man hours do they represent?

Im lucky enough to be able to count my contributions/effort  in  value, 
not time.  I think the time i have spent working with allegro has added 
value to my life.  And the allegro community (althou appearing to be a 
bunch of self-interested anarchists sometimes), is more helpful than 
many other communities.


>>There are plenty of things to investigate and fix before worrying 
about memory alignment.

Not everyone can or should be working on all parts of allegro, there 
just isn't enough time, perhaps those that want or need features can 
work on the things they want, then allegro can naturely serve its 
community, by being developed in a direction the community needs.  More 
specifically about memory alignement, its not some feature that "would 
be nice", its a requirement of SSE, and if you say then dont use SSE, 
your basically saying  "allegro is a 20th century library for Pentium1's 
actively being developed for that archicture", in 2005 i dont want to be 
saying that.


aj.