Sebastian Schöner
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sschoener.bsky.social
Sebastian Schöner
@sschoener.bsky.social
690 followers 52 following 310 posts
Programming! - previously at Epic Games, Unity Technologies, Paradox Dev Studios

https://blog.s-schoener.com
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sschoener.bsky.social
What I've learned over the last 1.5months of writing a GUI library: blog.s-schoener.com/2026-02-09-g...
February 9, 2026 at 10:12 AM
sschoener.bsky.social
Putting slim locks on a diet
blog.s-schoener.com/2026-01-28-r...
Putting slim locks on a diet | Sebastian Schöner
Let’s talk about reader-writer locks. Reader-writer locks are what you employ when you know that multiple readers can safely access a resource concurrently, but once there is a single writer that writ...
blog.s-schoener.com
January 28, 2026 at 2:46 PM
Reposted by Sebastian Schöner
lectem.bsky.social
Ever wrote spin-locks or had to debug them?
I have, and I got tired of seeing (and writing) crappy ones, so I did a real investigation this time.

Spoiler: trust your OS.

siliceum.com/en/blog/post...
Spinning around: Please don't! - siliceum
Embark on a journey about why you should sometimes trust your OS more than yourself.
siliceum.com
January 27, 2026 at 10:40 AM
sschoener.bsky.social
A piece on how I learned to appreciate the brainless enthusiasm of AI agents.
blog.s-schoener.com/2026-01-14-c...
Clauded optimism | Sebastian Schöner
This post is a continuation of my last post about programming with AI agents. I wanted to specifically talk about one property of Claude Code: The constant “Yes, of course!” and “That’s a brilliant id...
blog.s-schoener.com
January 14, 2026 at 1:57 PM
sschoener.bsky.social
An early good bye to 2025: blog.s-schoener.com/2025-12-19-y...
An early good bye to 2025 | Sebastian Schöner
There are less than 2 weeks left in 2025 and this means it is time to look back at the last year. In last year’s review I ended on this note: For the next year, I hope to spend more timing painting in...
blog.s-schoener.com
December 19, 2025 at 10:17 AM
sschoener.bsky.social
I wrote a few words about when improving codegen actually leads to better performance, motivated by my experiences with cpp2better: blog.s-schoener.com/2025-12-04-w...
When better codegen doesn't help | Sebastian Schöner
I want to write a few words about what sorts of games benefit from my build postprocessor for Unity il2cpp builds, cpp2better. It’s not the case that every game unconditionally benefits from it to the...
blog.s-schoener.com
December 4, 2025 at 11:50 AM
sschoener.bsky.social
How do you figure out why your C# projects are rebuilding, and how does the MSBuild log help?
blog.s-schoener.com/2025-11-24-m...
How to figure out why C# projects are rebuilding | Sebastian Schöner
A friend recently joked that all my blog posts are to some level just trauma processing. He is not entirely wrong. Today’s trauma is “why does it take 12s to recompile C# when nothing has changed?” I ...
blog.s-schoener.com
November 24, 2025 at 11:45 AM
sschoener.bsky.social
Every once in a while, I check the reviews on my games on Steam. It's always nice when a game finds the exact player it was made for. New review from July:

"We Love this game, it plays as advertised." (store.steampowered.com/app/1584170/...)

How I advertise it:
November 13, 2025 at 8:49 AM
Reposted by Sebastian Schöner
liveplusplus.bsky.social
Is your company interested in trying Live++? Want to know what it can do for you? Curious about its features?

You can now request a live demo through our website - free of charge!
liveplusplus.tech/request_live...

#cpp
November 6, 2025 at 3:46 PM
sschoener.bsky.social
Do you want to improve the performance of your il2cpp Unity projects, without changing your code or your assets? My il2cpp build processor cpp2better is now officially available (on request). Reach out to me, details here: blog.s-schoener.com/2025-11-04-c...
cpp2better, an il2cpp postprocessor | Sebastian Schöner
It’s been a while since I last talked about cpp2better. Time for an official “here it is” post. What is cpp2better? cpp2better is a tool that hooks into your build pipeline for Unity to achieve better...
blog.s-schoener.com
November 4, 2025 at 2:13 PM
sschoener.bsky.social
Do you want to know about what things might go wrong when cross-compiling from Linux to Windows? No? Ah, too bad. Then don't click the link below.

blog.s-schoener.com/2025-09-29-c...
What can go wrong in cross compilation | Sebastian Schöner
I have been unfortunate enough to embark on a journey of C++ cross-compilation, by choice nonetheless. In my case, I use clang to compile on a Linux machine to get binaries for a Windows machine. This...
blog.s-schoener.com
September 30, 2025 at 10:16 AM
sschoener.bsky.social
Async, too much
blog.s-schoener.com/2025-09-22-a...
Bilbo: "After all, why not? Why shouldn't I make this async?"
September 23, 2025 at 8:52 AM
sschoener.bsky.social
How I accidentally served as the control group for an AI experiment
blog.s-schoener.com/2025-09-17-c...
How I became the control group in an AI experiment | Sebastian Schöner
At the risk of alienating almost everyone reading this blog, I wanted to report some first hand experience of interacting with AI for programming. I specifically want to talk about how I accidentally ...
blog.s-schoener.com
September 17, 2025 at 9:28 AM
sschoener.bsky.social
How my attitude to "unfinished" code changed blog.s-schoener.com/2025-09-08-t...
TODO TITLE | Sebastian Schöner
In the past, I used to work in a codebase that had a lot of // @TODO: comments in it. Those TODOs would rank from obvious, small improvements to calls for features that would require an entire rewrite...
blog.s-schoener.com
September 10, 2025 at 9:21 AM
sschoener.bsky.social
Unreasonable within reason blog.s-schoener.com/2025-08-29-r...
Unreasonable within reason | Sebastian Schöner
Over the years I have come to appreciate “unreasonable” coworkers. What a weird sentence to write, right? When it comes to programming, you are usually fairly well advised to be “reasonable.” For exam...
blog.s-schoener.com
August 29, 2025 at 9:06 AM
sschoener.bsky.social
On a quest to become more naive.
blog.s-schoener.com/2025-08-19-s...
Speaking with curiosity | Sebastian Schöner
I had two interactions recently that surprised me in light of how I think about this blog. In the first interaction, someone referred to me as a “performance expert.” Thank you, that’s very kind of yo...
blog.s-schoener.com
August 19, 2025 at 8:52 AM
sschoener.bsky.social
Toying around with C vs. C++ compile times: blog.s-schoener.com/2025-08-13-c...
Does C compile faster than C++? | Sebastian Schöner
I recently found myself wondering whether it is faster to compile C than C++. On some level, the answer to this is an obvious “yes”: You can’t accidentally summon cthulhu SFINAE-thulhu in your C code,...
blog.s-schoener.com
August 13, 2025 at 10:27 AM
sschoener.bsky.social
What I learned about debug performance of C++ vector math: blog.s-schoener.com/2025-08-07-v...
Vector types and debug performance | Sebastian Schöner
For reasons, I have found myself writing a vector math library. Like Aras some time ago I’ve found an unpleasant surprise when looking at the debug performance of some vector types. There is no point ...
blog.s-schoener.com
August 7, 2025 at 12:21 PM
sschoener.bsky.social
How to speed up random memory accesses
blog.s-schoener.com/2025-07-28-r...
How to speed up random memory accesses | Sebastian Schöner
At some point when optimizing software, you are left with a soup of pointers that you just have to dereference, even though you know that you are going to suffer a cache miss for every single read. Co...
blog.s-schoener.com
July 29, 2025 at 11:12 AM
sschoener.bsky.social
How to iterate over section data in C++, and a disappointing conclusion blog.s-schoener.com/2025-07-14-s...
How to iterate over section data in C++ | Sebastian Schöner
Last time, we looked at callbacks you can directly embed into your binaries on Windows that are then called for every thread on start/end. The runtime is using this to initialize thread-locals that re...
blog.s-schoener.com
July 15, 2025 at 6:57 PM
sschoener.bsky.social
How to get thread create/exit callbacks on Windows, and learn a little bit about TLS on the way

blog.s-schoener.com/2025-07-07-t...
How to get thread create/exit callbacks on Windows | Sebastian Schöner
I recently needed to run a callback on thread shutdown and creation, on Windows. For exiting, you can apparently use FlsAlloc (MSDN), which is a part of the Fiber API. I’ve tried that, it works. But t...
blog.s-schoener.com
July 7, 2025 at 6:57 AM
sschoener.bsky.social
Making stupid mistakes:
blog.s-schoener.com/2025-07-04-s...
Stupid mistakes | Sebastian Schöner
Quite often, I see this: Forget it, I’m stupid, this is all wrong. or Sorry, I broke it, it was a stupid and unnecessary mistake. While some mistakes are actually unnecessary and completely avoidable,...
blog.s-schoener.com
July 4, 2025 at 11:20 AM
sschoener.bsky.social
I had to debug a crash that turned out to be caused by a misunderstanding of how the Windows linker deals with data imports, and I did not find this documented anywhere. So I fixed it:

blog.s-schoener.com/2025-06-15-w...
How does the Windows linker handle exported data? | Sebastian Schöner
I recently had to understand the details of what happens when on Windows you have a global variable in a DLL and try to use it from another. I did not find this spelled-out anywhere, so let’s change t...
blog.s-schoener.com
June 15, 2025 at 6:16 PM
sschoener.bsky.social
How The Mods Made Me: An unexpected blast from the past turned into a retrospective on creating games as a kid of the early 90s.

blog.s-schoener.com/2025-05-18-m...
How The Mods Made Me | Sebastian Schöner
Recently I got a message from someone that ran into a performance problem with a tool I wrote 15 years ago. On shutdown, the program would completely grind the entire machine to a halt for 3 minutes. ...
blog.s-schoener.com
May 19, 2025 at 9:07 AM
sschoener.bsky.social
Invisible loads and a case for non-member functions blog.s-schoener.com/2025-05-08-i...
Invisible loads and why I like free-standing functions | Sebastian Schöner
I have been grappling with a really silly C++ problem for a long time: I don’t like member functions, but I need to write member functions to get a decent programming UX. Member functions give me two ...
blog.s-schoener.com
May 8, 2025 at 9:35 AM