[Mesa-dev] [PATCH v2 01/23] glsl: Add parsing support for multi-stream output in geometry shaders.

[Ilia Mirkin]

On Fri, Jun 20, 2014 at 11:17 PM, Timothy Arceri <t_arceri at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> On Fri, 2014-06-20 at 10:46 -0700, Ian Romanick wrote:
>
>> I care a lot less about "what is often done" than I do about "what
>> should be done".  If there is an argument to be made that stand-alone
>> comments (not on a line with other code) are better, that would be good
>> data to have.
>
> Well I'm not sure how common a use case this is for Mesa devs but when
> doing any coding on a laptop the less wasted lines the better.
> Especially when the aspect ratio of all new laptops is suited to
> watching dvds rather than any kind of document viewing/editing.
> I personally do most of my Mesa contributions on the train travelling to
> and from work.
> For the same reason I've always wondered why the preferred width of
> lines is 78 columns? Is this just a historical thing? Or does it make
> sense to use this restriction e.g for debugging in the terminal? The
> devinfo.html doesn't give an actual reason, and 78 columns seems rather
> small considering the size and resolutions of modern screens.

I think a shorter line limit is *especially* important in the age of
modern screens that are way too wide. If you were to, say, double the
line length to 160, some lines would be very long but most would
remain short. So you would lose code density (half the window would be
empty), and you would lose the ability to have more windows
side-by-side. Also, it so happens that 2 80-char windows fit
*perfectly* side-by-side on a rotated 24" monitor (1200x1920).

  -ilia