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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]

#51

Post by dgellow »

inigyou wrote: post #48
dgellow wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He’s known for his Handmade hero series (unfortunately archived now) where he developed his game over 500+ episodes: https://hero.handmade.network/

I’m sure you can find bugs in the work of any game dev you would consider legendary, game implementation is generally very messy

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

#52

Post by ahartmetz »

tialaramex wrote: post #41
socalgal2 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 measu…

With a few caveats, though they do tend to get fixed over time. For example, frame rate. Higher frame rate is better, the end, right? Wellll...

Latency and hitching are annoying to measure, so for a long time, they were pretty much ignored. That has improved and hopefully will continue to improve. There is the bufferbloat initiative, gaming magazines take frame time histograms now, input devices and screens commonly have their latency measured. But latency is still under-measured - for GPUs / GPU drivers, for all software, for games and particularly for websites.

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

#53

Post by inigyou »

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…

Casey generally, across all his material, advocates for non-pessimisation. Measurement takes too long to apply it to your entire program. He advocates for thinking about how much work the computer should actually have to do, then not making it do much more than that, at all times. This means avoiding serial dependency chains on the network, and huge towers of abstractions, and redundant work. He allows for writing lazy slow code as an intentional tradeoff that you may revise later if it becomes a bottleneck. He does not allow for inherently slow architecture.

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

#54

Post by OtomotO »

JamesSwift wrote: post #45
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.

Absolutely.

Like I agree with most everything he says and I like to optimise my own software, but for my day to day jobs and contracts it's simply not feasible.

That level of performance and rigor is not what is demanded nor paid or appreciated.

E.g. in Enterprise circles it's still OOP from top to bottom.

Mixed with a tad more functional style due to varying adoption of that paradigm in the languages used by enterprise.

But low level optimizations are not interesting to these customers at all, even though they could help them with some problems.

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

#55

Post by Almondsetat »

JamesSwift wrote: post #45
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.

How is this relevant? I didn't say he should make a book about his teachings about SWE, I said he could compile a comprehensive review of the foundational literature of compsci

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

#56

Post by shimman »

Almondsetat wrote: post #55
JamesSwift wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How is this relevant? I didn't say he should make a book about his teachings about SWE, I said he could compile a comprehensive review of the foundational literature of compsci

Well the comment was about the history of SWE, if you want a comprehensive history you don't focus on the lived memory of one single individual.

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

#57

Post by Pannoniae »

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…

Sure, but there are performance issues no profiler will catch in a straightforward flamegraph reading. Some examples:

1. Your hottest loop is spilling registers which only shows up as non-local cache thrashing (i.e. some other random code becomes slow) or randomly slow instructions i.e. "why is this xorps to initialise this float suddenly slow" due to pipeline stalls

2. Your code stops fitting into cache due to the code bloat, there's no one method which is slow, everything is slowed down by a percentage factor

3. A lot of useless work being done like temporary strings being copied everywhere

4. Your code is "I/O bound" because all the data you're accessing is scattered all across memory, leading to completely predictable TLB stalls

It's very easy to make a large program, quite a bit harder to make a small one...

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

#58

Post by 3eb7988a1663 »

inigyou wrote: post #48
dgellow wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

John Carmack is a legendary game programmer. If I can identify a superior algorithmic approach to something in Doom, does that disqualify Carmack's credentials?

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

#59

Post by torginus »

andai wrote: post #34
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.

Maybe go for a long drive? Long walk? Whatever floats your boat. I used to do manual labor and I would work my way through like eight hours of audiobooks per day.

I've noticed after I've switched to audiobooks that my retention is horrible compared to reading. For actual complex topics, it's even worse.

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

#60

Post by Almondsetat »

shimman wrote: post #56
Almondsetat wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this relevant? I didn't say he should make a book about his teachings about SWE, I said he could compile a comprehensive review of the foundational literature of compsci

Well the comment was about the history of SWE, if you want a comprehensive history you don't focus on the lived memory of one single individual.

Where have I said I want his lived memories?
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