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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]

#221

Post by socalgal2 »

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #217
socalgal2 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal above was to write fast software. The developers made the mistake of seeing that they had saturated all the cores as "We did a good job of using the entire machine" = "our code is fast". They had a measurement and misinterpreted what it meant.

This is just dumb. You wanted to improve performance but measured memory instead? Whoops. Why not measure performance for which there are many good metrics.

They didn't measure memory, they measured how busy each processing unit was. It's like going into Activity Monitor, Tops, Task Manager, seeing all CPUs at 100% from your app and thinking "We've reach peak perf by utilizing all the processing power"

People still do that today. They run some LLM or gen AI type app. See all the numbers reach high percentages, and wrongly think "this app is using all of my machine's potential"

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

#222

Post by pezezin »

tancop wrote: post #135
sirwhinesalot wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Highly successful middleware provider back in the day" is an understatement. Bink was the cutscene video codec for a long time and it's still the most popular option by far. Kraken compression is so good Sony worked with AMD to make a hardware decoder for the PS5 and paid for a general license that lets games use it for free. They are probably stronger than ever in terms of games using their tech and collected licen…

Honest question, but what is the benefit of Bink over standard codecs like H.264/265 or AV1? Specially nowadays that every GPU provides hardware-accelerated video decoding...

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

#223

Post by bena »

tialaramex wrote: post #219
bena wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, there's another adage that comes into play here: Build one to throw away, you will anyhow. His second attempt, no matter how he made it, was made with the context of his earlier mistakes. RAII doesn't lead to spaghetti code necessarily. If anything, "unity builds" would more encourage spaghetti as it's easier to reference anything else in your build.

I think the mess you'll get with too much "Handmade" / Casey style ZII is actually slightly worse than if you lean too hard on RAII but it may well be less visible and so you don't notice. For video games you can get things pretty badly wrong on the technical front these days and deliver an excellent game, that's one of the things Blue Prince demonstrates really well, a lot of the guts of Blue Prince are a trash fire…

Yeah, that's why I can't take game developers too seriously when they harp on overall software quality.

They write a specific type of software that is very forgiving of bad architecture. Hell, some games are very forgiving of slow software as well.

For example, since we're talking about Muratori, The Witness does not have any of the concerns something as banal as Word has. The Witness gets to run for a single user as the sole application, without regard for anything else, and doesn't persist anything notable to the system.

There are entire universes of bugs and issues you just never even have to know exist. Hell, even Call of Duty supports multiplayer, which the Witness does not have to do.

Not to mention, sometimes your choice is between good performance or good architecture. Yes, functions cost, abstractions cost, all of this stuff costs. But some applications don't have the luxury of being replaced every Christmas. Some applications never get to "feature complete", they are living entities.

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

#224

Post by groundzeros2015 »

socalgal2 wrote: post #221
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just dumb. You wanted to improve performance but measured memory instead? Whoops. Why not measure performance for which there are many good metrics.

They didn't measure memory, they measured how busy each processing unit was. It's like going into Activity Monitor, Tops, Task Manager, seeing all CPUs at 100% from your app and thinking "We've reach peak perf by utilizing all the processing power" People still do that today. They run some LLM or gen AI type app. See all the numbers reach high percentages, and wrongly think "this app is using all of my machine's pote…

Yes it was an analogy about measuring two unrelated things.

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

#225

Post by layla5alive »

ranger_danger wrote: post #186
ntstatusquo wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My one data point is that Casey’s handmade hero series, and his immediate mode gui video from way back in 2005, are what introduced me and some friends to an entirely new way to build graphical user interfaces, and I do feel a great appreciation for that. Guys like Ryan Fleury (of RadDbg) and Vjekoslav Krajacic of Filepilot similarly credit Casey with their “radicalization” :) To your point though, it was less about…

That series also produced this gem: > Open source is the very worst thing currently going on because it is so incredibly exploitative, it's far more exploitative than any actual company is of the workers who work at the company. > Even the people who are getting paid in open source are getting massively underpaid to do it compared to how much the people who are using their code are making, it's nothing compared to th…

This is the first I've heard of these critiques from him, and as someone who loves open source/Linux, and belives it makes the world better in many ways, I think they're pretty valid. The model has major issues in at least two distinct ways:

1. Not paying for the labor corporations exploit. GPL is better here, but still imperfect. MIT/BSD is awful here. It wouldn't matter in an ideal post-scarcity society, but we don't live in that yet, so it does matter. Until post-scarcity, a better model would route revenue from exploitative capitalist uses back to the creators and/or their desired sinks.

2. The open source bait-and-switch - startups using open source to get users and then pulling up the ladder and going closed source and monopolistic once they have achieved scale to enforce/ achieve lock in.

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

#226

Post by ranger_danger »

layla5alive wrote: post #225
ranger_danger wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That series also produced this gem: > Open source is the very worst thing currently going on because it is so incredibly exploitative, it's far more exploitative than any actual company is of the workers who work at the company. > Even the people who are getting paid in open source are getting massively underpaid to do it compared to how much the people who are using their code are making, it's nothing compared to th…

This is the first I've heard of these critiques from him, and as someone who loves open source/Linux, and belives it makes the world better in many ways, I think they're pretty valid. The model has major issues in at least two distinct ways: 1. Not paying for the labor corporations exploit. GPL is better here, but still imperfect. MIT/BSD is awful here. It wouldn't matter in an ideal post-scarcity society, but we don…

Usually when I talk to very staunch FOSS zealots they're bewildered that someone would care what a corporation does with their code... at least as long as the license terms are adhered to.

In fact they don't seem to care about money at all, often believing all corporations/capitalism are bad, and that they and everyone else should just be poor and live in the woods or something.

I feel like if you plotted open-source vs proprietary code percentages against the rate of innovation, it would be a bell curve: once you start giving away too much, the incentive to innovate diminishes.

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

#227

Post by tialaramex »

josephg wrote: post #209
nextaccountic wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safe Haskell is just a worst version of Rust's unsafe. What it actually does is equivalent to Rust's #![forbid(unsafe_code)] which immediately lead to a question: so Haskell has unsafe, just like Rust? And of course it does. Any practical systems language has unsafe in one form or another, not only for FFI but also for performance, Rust is just honest about it. There's two reasons Safe Haskell is substantially worse…

The thing I really want is a language or environment with no implicit access rights. So, if I call add(a, b) then the add function doesn’t have implicit access to the filesystem, network or global variables in other parts of the program. If you want to give a function access to a subdirectory, you should pass a handle to that subdirectory as an argument and use openat() or equivalent. This would guarantee - at a lang…

> The thing I really want is a language or environment with no implicit access rights

I don't think you'll find anything like that from a General Purpose Language, so you probably want something like WUFFS [Wrangling Untrusted File Formats Safely].

https://github.com/google/wuffs

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

#229

Post by josephg »

tialaramex wrote: post #227
josephg wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing I really want is a language or environment with no implicit access rights. So, if I call add(a, b) then the add function doesn’t have implicit access to the filesystem, network or global variables in other parts of the program. If you want to give a function access to a subdirectory, you should pass a handle to that subdirectory as an argument and use openat() or equivalent. This would guarantee - at a lang…

> The thing I really want is a language or environment with no implicit access rights I don't think you'll find anything like that from a General Purpose Language, so you probably want something like WUFFS [Wrangling Untrusted File Formats Safely]. https://github.com/google/wuffs

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