

Origin of Quake3's Fast InvSqrt() - hhm
http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/8/

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henning
when you use code that obfuscatory, wouldn't you want to give a comment
explaining its origin and where to go for further info? i never understood why
the origin of any piece of code that shipped in a major game from a high-
profile development team would ever be hard to track down.

you should know who added it, when, and why (the code should be self-
explanatory, or be refactored, or a comment should be provided for cutesy
performance hacks like this).

~~~
aston
This code was written when the software industry looked very different.
Particularly, the teams were super tiny, and cleverness won out over code
clarity every time due to the relatively weak computation power that was
readily accessible. I would have been surprised to hear that any of the
dirty/genius hacks found in apps written in the 80's and early 90's was well
documented.

That good sqrt code made it into Quake 3 from previous codebases is also not
surprising. If it ain't broke...

------
gb
There's a short follow up that identifies the author too:
<http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/15/>

