The Deadlock Empire

Games

educational puzzle game

SHOW HN2016

269points
30comments
#83of 2,264 in 2016
Top 4%of 2016 by points

How HN took it

LovedMost comments that take a side are positive

9 positive, 4 neutral or asking, 2 mixed, 0 critical, out of 15 comments about the project. Thread score +0.50.

Idea: 3 for, 0 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Fun and educational way to learn concurrency pitfalls

    From 3 comments
    • This is awesome! I love this kind of games - they are very fun and educational at the same time. If you're like me, you might enjoy these as well: 1. Microcorruption -…
      nbaksalyar on HN
    • Took me about an hour to beat it, I'm still fairly new to concurrent programming so this was pretty great for showing me the pitfalls you can come across.
      BackwardSpy on HN
    • >Seems like you have to trick the threads in the correct sequence in order to introduce deadlocks This manually "trickery" you are introducing is you intentionally replicating…
      brobinson on HN
  • Good for building paranoia about multithreaded code

    From 1 comment
    • >Seems like you have to trick the threads in the correct sequence in order to introduce deadlocks This manually "trickery" you are introducing is you intentionally replicating…
      brobinson on HN

Objections

  • Models only linearizable memory, not reorderings

    From 1 comment
    • This is really cool! However, I was somewhat disappointed that it only models a linearizable memory (each low-level operation atomically acts on the same global state). It would…
      ziedaniel1 on HN
  • Unclear overall context and goal of the game

    From 1 comment
    • What language is this in? Never really tried anything like this before, but just went through the entire game and beat it. Seems like you have to trick the threads in the correct…
      rajangdavis on HN

Requests

  • Add memory model and reordering support, e.g. write buffers and barriers

    From 2 comments
    • This is really cool! However, I was somewhat disappointed that it only models a linearizable memory (each low-level operation atomically acts on the same global state). It would…
      ziedaniel1 on HN
    • You could add a CPU write buffer or cache lines as an intermediate step between the code and memory, and allow the player to choose when those get flushed to memory, constrained…
      JoshTriplett on HN
  • Show fixed code after solving each bug

    From 1 comment
    • This is pretty nice, well done! One suggestion: it would be nice if you somehow integrated the fix for each bug into the game somehow. At the very least, in the congratulations…
      jader201 on HN

Questions

  • What language is the game written in

    From 1 comment
    • What language is this in? Never really tried anything like this before, but just went through the entire game and beat it. Seems like you have to trick the threads in the correct…
      rajangdavis on HN

Alternatives named

  • Microcorruption

    From 1 comment
    • This is awesome! I love this kind of games - they are very fun and educational at the same time. If you're like me, you might enjoy these as well: 1. Microcorruption -…
      nbaksalyar on HN
  • Ruby Warrior

    From 1 comment
    • Ruby Warrior is another great one. I had a lot of fun with it when I needed to learn Ruby for work. https://www.bloc.io/ruby-warrior
      WillAbides on HN
  • Over the Wire

    From 1 comment
    • This is awesome! I love this kind of games - they are very fun and educational at the same time. If you're like me, you might enjoy these as well: 1. Microcorruption -…
      nbaksalyar on HN
  • Scalatron

    From 1 comment
    • Scalatron is another great one https://scalatron.github.io/ "a free, open-source programming game in which bots, written in Scala, compete in a virtual arena for energy and…
      moondowner on HN
  • Untrusted

    From 1 comment
    • Continuing the theme of replying to this post with good examples of these kinds of game: https://alexnisnevich.github.io/untrusted/ ("a user javascript adventure game")
      cmpb on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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