Casey Muratori – The Root of the Root of All Evil – BSC 2026 [video] • Hacker News Board

tl;dr the saying is that "premature optimisation is the root of all evil", and Casey burrows into contemporary data to show that really although the claim was 3% of the code takes up 90% of the runtime even then it was more likely 4% takes 50%.

The best thing you could take away from this lecture is something a reasonable person should take away from the original "root of all evil" saying anyway. Measure. Measure. Measure. If you aren't measuring that's not optimization it's masturbation.

Ironically in the process of measuring for a third time yesterday I tripped a bug in Bill's language for which I opened an issue. This is not the goal of measuring three times but merely a happy accident.

Along the way Casey discovers (?) that Structured Programming means just what we today call programming†, that software was a lot smaller in the days when 4096 bytes of RAM was a good entry level option and that loads of these famous people from 1970s computer science knew each other.

† And knowing about this is one reason the Structured Concurrency people want that everywhere. Very possibly there's a future where it seems silly that people once wrote programs which did not use structured concurrency.

Re: Casey Muratori – The Root of the Root of All Evil – BSC 2026 [video]

#6

Post by cuechan » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 1:16 PM UTC

He is just legendary when it comes to game programming

Re: Casey Muratori – The Root of the Root of All Evil – BSC 2026 [video]

#7

Post by arnorhs » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 1:16 PM UTC

nchmy wrote: post #3

kshallvari wrote: post #2

THE LEGENDARY GAME PROGRAMMER

Isn't that Jonathan blow? (to be clear, I'm a big fan of Casey)

I believe this is referencing a meme on the primeagen's standup podcast, where Casey is referred to as legendary while he feels undeserving of this title.

Titles aside, his talk is really insightful and it is super interesting to do a deep dive on these old computer/programming topics as the modern concepts were being discovered

Re: Casey Muratori – The Root of the Root of All Evil – BSC 2026 [video]

#8

Post by mberning » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 1:19 PM UTC

Will have to give this a watch after the kids go to bed. I like a lot of Casey’s views even if I don’t agree with them.

Re: Casey Muratori – The Root of the Root of All Evil – BSC 2026 [video]

#9

Post by torginus » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 1:25 PM UTC

Personally I'm quite sure this is super interesting, but I don't really have 3 hours to listen to this, even 1.5h at 2x speed is too much.

I would very much prefer something written down, so I could absorb this at my own pace. I know, gift horse, but still.

Re: Casey Muratori – The Root of the Root of All Evil – BSC 2026 [video]

#10

Post by knollimar » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 1:30 PM UTC

torginus wrote: post #9

Personally I'm quite sure this is super interesting, but I don't really have 3 hours to listen to this, even 1.5h at 2x speed is too much. I would very much prefer something written down, so I could absorb this at my own pace. I know, gift horse, but still.

If you want a spoilery TLDR: It's more about the journey. He tracks down the origin, finds the support, finds the support flawed, and leaves you to your own conclusion rather than make a new flawed one.

The basic idea is that the origin assumes a highly critical inner hot loop, don't assume where it is, and optimize there.

There's some other time spent saying this justifies slower abstractions for maintainability elsewhere.