Dennis Gustafsson – Parallelizing the physics solver – BSC 2025
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN points to it as a practical example of solving a tricky multithreading problem, including using a spinlock to speed up a real-time physics solver.
What it is
Dennis Gustafsson, creator of Teardown, presents how he parallelized the physics solver for an upcoming game, followed by a Q&A. The talk was given at the Better Software Conference 2025.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2025 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Recommends fasterik · 2026-01 · on “Spinning around: Please don't – Common problems with spin locks”
As always: use standard libraries, profile, then write your own if the data indicates it's necessary. The following is an interesting talk where the author used a spinlock to speed up a real-time physics solver significantly. Dennis Gustafsson – Parallelizing the physics solver – BSC 2025 [this video]
Recommends Hikikomori · 2026-03 · on “The unlikely story of Teardown Multiplayer”
Not about multiplayer but still interesting. Dennis Gustafsson – Parallelizing the physics solver – BSC 2025 [this video]
Cites levodelellis · 2025-11 · on “Futurelock: A subtle risk in async Rust”
From my understanding this talk describes how he implemented a solution for a similar problem [this video] I'm saying if you're not writing multi-threaded code everyday, use a library. It can use atomics/locks but you shouldn't use it directly. If the library is designed well it'd be impossible to deadlock.