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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]

#81

Post by bckr »

Almondsetat wrote: post #66
layla5alive wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think there aren't other people equally or more qualified? I mean Casey may be the most visible person with those qualifications - but lack of visibility doesn't imply lack of competence, plenty of brilliant people work in the background..

Feel free to point to anyone doing these deep dives that specifically tackle the lost knowledge of the early decades of computer science and the ideas that have not yet come to fruition despite being extremely old

Who is also a working engineer (and programmer of the highest caliber) who is in touch with the zeitgeist of engineering.

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

#82

Post by bena »

dgellow wrote: post #51
inigyou wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

660+ and the game was never finished

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

#83

Post by mananaysiempre »

wavemode wrote: post #72
Pannoniae wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 / menta…

No, I don't think the way you're characterizing this is accurate. I/O is inherently very slow compared to computation. And many programs genuinely don't have any useful computation to do while waiting for I/O - because the result of that I/O operation contains the information needed for the program to even make its next decision. Such programs are not necessarily impossible to optimize. One common optimization is to…

> I/O is inherently very slow compared to computation.

Not anymore, no. Your SSD, before any caching, does gigabytes per second of sequential reads. For any bytewise processing, except the most trivial of tasks, you’ll struggle to get above a few hundred megabytes per second with scalar (native) code. To actually keep up with a modern SSD, you’ll virtually always have to hand-write SIMD loops, minimize the number of syscalls with tools like io_uring, or possibly be smart about distributing tasks across cores without ruining the access pattern.

For instance, simdjson is famously fast but I don’t believe it can keep up with say a high-end PCIe Gen 4 SSD like a Samsung 990 PRO, let alone the latest-and-greatest (and, literally, hottest) Gen 5 stuff. And I know of no Unicode normalizer that would be able to do a gigabyte per second on general inputs (not ASCII, not Latin-1) simply because the latency for dependent lookup table accesses is absolute murder.

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

#84

Post by Almondsetat »

bob1029 wrote: post #78
Almondsetat wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feel free to point to anyone doing these deep dives that specifically tackle the lost knowledge of the early decades of computer science and the ideas that have not yet come to fruition despite being extremely old

> Feel free to point to anyone doing these deep dives Most of this kind of content comes off as relevant/topical but mindless entertainment. This is not a "deep dive" of anything that I could practically apply in my daily work. It feels good to think this content might add value and then to subsequently consume it, but it's effectively junk food. I used to spend a lot of time watching crap like lex and primagen befor…

You are making many assumptions. First of all, he is doing the deep dives by researching all those articles, and of course the resulting presentation will be very superficial. The point is exactly to publish a book to allow the reader to partake in the deep dive. Secondly, nobody said anything about applying that stuff to your daily work.

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

#85

Post by tialaramex »

brewmarche wrote: post #68
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…

In other videos Casey argues against the profile–fix–repeat workflow (I’m not saying that you necessarily meant this by measuring), instead arguing for estimating the theoretical maximum, then trying to get close enough to it. His argument is that the former might push you towards a local minimum without realising that you could do much better

When "Estimating the theoretical maximum" you're going to bring your assumptions to that estimate and so you're equally likely to get stuck in some local optimal point because you didn't see what else was possible, so that doesn't persuade me much. Worse, now it's a local optimal which might be entirely in your head.

There is some space for this "Estimate the theoretical maximum" as a high level insight, if the software needs to do a thing which your estimate says is impossible that's important to address up front but I think for practical software engineering you're much more likely to need profile-fix-repeat

Actually measuring is crucial and an estimate is not a measurement. I think one of the reasons many in the Handmade Community don't like measuring is that it too often ruins their "estimate" of how the crap they've written is achieving a "theoretical maximum" in favour of a boring fact that it's much worse than alternatives.

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

#86

Post by bsoles »

bob1029 wrote: post #78
Almondsetat wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feel free to point to anyone doing these deep dives that specifically tackle the lost knowledge of the early decades of computer science and the ideas that have not yet come to fruition despite being extremely old

> Feel free to point to anyone doing these deep dives Most of this kind of content comes off as relevant/topical but mindless entertainment. This is not a "deep dive" of anything that I could practically apply in my daily work. It feels good to think this content might add value and then to subsequently consume it, but it's effectively junk food. I used to spend a lot of time watching crap like lex and primagen befor…

As much as I like to watch Casey, Prime, etc. on YouTube, they are not going to teach anybody anything. They are just entertainment for software people with a certain viewpoint.

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

#87

Post by jddndnfnfn »

Almondsetat wrote: post #84
bob1029 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Feel free to point to anyone doing these deep dives Most of this kind of content comes off as relevant/topical but mindless entertainment. This is not a "deep dive" of anything that I could practically apply in my daily work. It feels good to think this content might add value and then to subsequently consume it, but it's effectively junk food. I used to spend a lot of time watching crap like lex and primagen befor…

You are making many assumptions. First of all, he is doing the deep dives by researching all those articles, and of course the resulting presentation will be very superficial. The point is exactly to publish a book to allow the reader to partake in the deep dive. Secondly, nobody said anything about applying that stuff to your daily work.

[flagged]

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

#88

Post by cratermoon »

Almondsetat wrote: post #66
layla5alive wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think there aren't other people equally or more qualified? I mean Casey may be the most visible person with those qualifications - but lack of visibility doesn't imply lack of competence, plenty of brilliant people work in the background..

Feel free to point to anyone doing these deep dives that specifically tackle the lost knowledge of the early decades of computer science and the ideas that have not yet come to fruition despite being extremely old

Kevlin Henney

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

#89

Post by PeterStuer »

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

He's entertaining and well spoken. Love it. Not sure the book medium would be the best avenue. My own sweet spot is presentations, live interviews and meetings. I can't write for sh*t, even if I tried. I know.

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

#90

Post by hirvi74 »

tialaramex wrote: post #44
mrkeen wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 unbothe…

So, I have never seen anyone actually use GOTOs, so maybe a lot of the stigma comes from excessive, poor usage or something.

However, having written a good chunk of ASM in my life. I don't think jumps or branches are really that hard to follow. Jumps/Branches and GOTOs specify the next location. It is not as though one has to guess where.

It's not the arrow, it's the archer that is the problem.

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