On 21 June 2013 18:33, Raffaele Fragapane <raffsxsil...@googlemail.com>wrote:
> If anything my only gripe with fabric right now is that they keep > referring to TDs as the slow children of RnD, as if being a TD means you > can cobble together a script as long as you can chain run it to debug, but > God forbid you'd be able to run a compiler :p There's a big difference between a trained software engineer that can write multithreaded C++ and the standard TD (that I see most consistently across studios) that can write a bit of C++ but is most comfortable with Python/MEL etc. Finding a domain expert in software engineering that's also a domain expert in VFX is quite challenging - most TDs do not fit this description. What we see is a lot of people that know exactly what they want to achieve, but don't have the time, inclination or skillset to write it in C++. That might not fit your definition of a TD, but outside of large studios I don't meet many TDs that are C++ programmers - they self-identify as such. You're correct in saying that the actual value of KL is in the various multi-threading paradigms (and the ease of access to them). However, having spent the first 18 months of our existence trying to market a language and a multithreading engine, we realised that nobody cares :) Instead we simplified the technical message to "KL is a high-level language like Python, these are normally slow but KL is as fast as highly optimized C++. This means people that are comfortable with high-level languages can now write high performance code". In reality, nobody cares about that much either. What people want to know is "so what can I do that I couldn't do before?". So it might end up being a bit simplistic or patronizing to people that understand the technology, but the intent is to try and make it easy to understand why what we're doing is valuable. Marketing a platform to everyone is difficult - if we make it so technical people are satisfied from the outset, then we lose everyone else. Now we're showing actual solutions, it becomes more interesting to understand 'how?' - so we might have to adapt a bit. You'll be pleased to know we're working with a PR agency who want to rewrite all of our copy :) The last thing I'll say is that the dynamic compilation is as important as the multi-threading - speed of development, ease of deployment, portability of code and outright performance. We used to message heavily around this and it didn't get us very far.
