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

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

#41

Post by tialaramex »

socalgal2 wrote: post #27
tialaramex wrote: post #5

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. Me…

> Measure. Measure. Measure. The problem is knowing what to measure. There's another saying "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." As an example from memory, there was a game dev company that celebrated they had maxed out the cores on the PS3. That didn't mean anything though, anyone can max out the cores by filing them with bad code. But hey, their "measurement" told them they had maxed o…

> The problem is knowing what to measure.

This can be a problem, but much less so because so often we're doing "easy mode" where we don't need a proxy. The "it ceases to be a good measure" is because you're measuring a proxy. You wanted to deliver happiness, you measured wealth because it was easier to measure but seemed correlated and now you've got rich miserable people, oops. But software engineers can often measure the actual thing they want to improve directly, not a proxy and so it cannot cease to be a good measure.

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

#42

Post by MobiusHorizons »

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.

It is quite long, but I thought it was worth it if you can find the time. Short of that I think just reading the Knuth article the quote is from might bring similar insights.

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

#43

Post by sirwhinesalot »

socalgal2 wrote: post #25
cuechan wrote: post #6

He is just legendary when it comes to game programming

What games has he shipped?

The legendary games programmer thing is a meme.

Casey is professionally best known for his work at RAD game tools (a highly successful middleware provider for game development back in the day), not games he himself developed.

What he is most highly regarded for is his teaching, particularly the Handmade Hero series on YouTube, which various programmers directly attribute as being responsible for their own professional success to a large extent.

He did work on the video games Dungeon Siege and The Witness afaik, but that's not what he is known for.

He also made one of the fastest terminal emulators (refterm), purely out of spite, to show Microsoft they were full of shit in their answer to an issue he posted to the Windows Terminal github. This directly led to performance improvements in Windows Terminal.

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

#44

Post by tialaramex »

mrkeen wrote: post #26
abainbridge wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another point I liked was that there was, apparently, an influential book called Structured Programming, whose content was so universally agreed upon, that all programming became Structured Programming. Nobody needs the book anymore.

Hard to tell if sarcastic, but anyway. I think the GOTOers just died out. Some day null, statements (rather than expressions) and side-effects will have always been wrong.

It's not the focus of the talk and so it's hard to tell if Casey understands (the choice to separate the words GO TO in several places suggests he does) but the `goto` keyword you've seen in several modern languages is not the problematic "GO TO statement", it's a de-fanged remnant, the toy poodle to GO TO's wolf pack.

The actual GO TO complained of is, like the jump instruction in machine code, just entirely unbothered by context. Want to go from the middle of this code about employee payroll processing to mid-way through initializing a weather simulation? No problem. Well. No problem for the machine, for a human programmer it's a complete nightmare. Actually that's putting it mildly, nightmares have more structure. You cannot do anything like that with for example C's goto.

You compiler can, and in a few cases (that's what the discussion about the tail-call optimisation is about for example) it will, but the program you wrote doesn't do this and so you don't have to try to keep the whole program in your head.

So in that sense GOTO died out with, maybe BASICs? I think the BASICs tend to have that wolf nature GOTO feature, but nothing modern has it.

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

#45

Post by JamesSwift »

Almondsetat wrote: post #15

I think Casey is currently the most informed person to make a series of books or articles summarizing the history of SW Engineering, all the lessons learned and forgotten, and all the good stuff that was published and still hasn't gained traction in the practice

Ehh I love Casey and have learned a ton by watching how he thinks about things in his handmade hero series, but he is fairly narrow minded in his views of dev. Not that theres anything wrong with that, for the kinds of dev he does his approach is very good. But its not generalizable.

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

#46

Post by flumpcakes »

dist-epoch wrote: post #20
nchmy wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, that would be John Carmack

Death-frightening scion capable of seeing beyond the illusionary world before our eyes John Carmack?

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

#47

Post by [deleted] »

xen0 wrote: post #36
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.

Thanks to modern playback technology, you can pause it and resume play later at your convenience.

[deleted]

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

#48

Post by inigyou »

dgellow wrote: post #4
nchmy wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They are both legendary game programmers

Are they? Casey programmed the walk monster for Jon's game, a brute force tester to make sure you could always walk both ways and never get stuck, instead of building the walking system using a nav mesh. There was one place you could walk where you weren't supposed to, despite the walk monster, that would have been obvious if it was a nav mesh.

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

#49

Post by Pannoniae »

FacelessJim wrote: post #22

Terrific presentation. But I have a comment: His dismissal of the argument Knuth makes regarding the hot loops could have been explored a bit better. I found it weird he didn’t mention the difference of types of programs of then vs now. Even today, in scientific code it is still absolutely the case a lot of the time that a huge chunk of the runtime comes from a single very very hot loop. It might be hidden in a libra…

Being I/O bound is usually a result of bad engineering practices though. If you're I/O bound, that either means the problem doesn't require much computation - which is possible but fairly rare, or more likely that your code is so unoptimised that barely any computation gets carried out while your code is waiting on memory/disk/network.

"I can't do anything because my program is I/O-bound" is more of an excuse / mental justification of why your program is slow instead of an honest reason for so.

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

#50

Post by inigyou »

sirwhinesalot wrote: post #43
socalgal2 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What games has he shipped?

The legendary games programmer thing is a meme. Casey is professionally best known for his work at RAD game tools (a highly successful middleware provider for game development back in the day), not games he himself developed. What he is most highly regarded for is his teaching, particularly the Handmade Hero series on YouTube, which various programmers directly attribute as being responsible for their own professiona…

He mostly evangelizes non-pessimal software. He advocates that your program should only be a small factor like 3x slower than the hypothetical optimum - instead of 10000x slower as today's software often is. He compared Visual C++ 6's debugger on hardware from the time to current Visual Studio's debugger on current hardware, and found the former much faster when performing the exact same tasks on the exact same project file and code files.
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