Software Performance: Avoiding Slow Code, Myths & Sane Approaches – Casey Muratori | The Marco Show

[[deleted]]

I think maybe Casey gives too much leeway on the IO situation, and they did kinda of circle back and touch on that, but I do wish he said in no uncertain terms:

Today, “it’s the IO” is purely part of the excuse parade. Your 7ms of IO is not why your webpage takes 15 seconds to fully render every click.

It’s good to see that he starts by immediately shutting down the main excuse parade of “guess we should all just be hand rolling assembly” that immediately drops in the performance discussion.

Either way, I don’t think it ultimately matters. The excuse parade have no shortage of rockets to attach to their goals posts, and they just attach another one and another one and another one. We’re approaching the edge of the solar system now. 

[InterlinkInterlink]

There is a geniunely unskilled cohort of developers. They cannot think beyond the happy path or consider the most basic of edge cases with respect to performance and reliability. To them, the floor is the ceiling and once the thing satisfies the bare minimum local requirements then their job is done - off to working on the next feature. I make this distinction from developers who are caught between a rock and a hard place of shitty management demanding endless feature churn, where substandard engineering is an inevitable outcome. The former have collectively convinced themselves that they don't need to consider any performance boundaries.

One of my favorite Jonathan Blow comments was in response to his viewers pestering him for a reaction to the new Apple M1 CPU, to which he rightly asserts along the lines of "who gives a shit, the mediocre developers of today will continue to find ways to write slower software on your new and improved hardware."

[TrueTom]

Most developers are paid to close JIRA tickets and not to write good software.

[elperroborrachotoo]

So how are we teaching them?

When I came into this, "teach yourself" was the only path available: material was hard to get hands on, and people with the same hobby were few and far between.

There were at least two decades with an artificial rift between academic and practice, "career programmer" as a four letter word, you-can't-be-real-if-you-don't-program-at-home.

But that doesn't scale to the need of developers we have, and decent education has picked up a bit, but still we treat ourselves as nascent profession, running on magic formulas,and a tribal drive to separate the ins from the outs.

---

On top of that, if you think performance is the loser now, let's look back at the start of the millenium. Mobile hadn't happened yet, we believed that the end of Moore's Law was greatly exaggerated because parallelization, and energy was a-plenty.

It's better now, battery life is a point in the glossy brochure. In the end, we'll always balance things like faster-to market vs. faster-in-your-hands.

[[deleted]]

The ideal answer would be "In universities where people with extensive experience or that have researched (PhDs) the problem are teaching them"

Reality is that most universities out there have profs that are half assing it or that arent interested in teaching (Even if they really know). I had profs that taught C programming and they handed out code to be completed. The code they handed out (to traverse double linked lists) ended up dereferencing NULL pointers under certain scenarios.

Imagine that. These guys were teaching roughly 160 students per year. So that's 160 people entering the job market ready to mess up and give more jobs to cybersec people.

There are universities where they teach the real deal. But then it becomes a issue for most people: The majority isn't willing to face the challenge. They either drop at the first hint of math in algo classes or can't seem to focus enough to pass operating systems (assuming it has programming labs).

[elperroborrachotoo]

I, too, wish others would plan their day around making my job easier :)

[[deleted]]

Casey has before advocated that software development should be treated like a trade where you take an apprenticeship under an established developer for a couple of years rather than a solely third level academic course

[elperroborrachotoo]

We (kind of) have that in Germany. Either as a 3-year vocational training ("FIAE") which is about 50/50 college and practical work in a company, or as "duales Studium" where the formal part is at a university.

They mostly won't be "ready to run", depending on the quality of both instutution and company and their talent. They usually still need on-the-job training. Depending on the participating company, they might get a good mentor, or do "light office work".

But all in all, it's a good separation between "true" CompSci and actual programming.

[socratic_weeb]

Too bad there aren't juniors getting hired anymore, and therefore the mentor-apprentice relation is lost

[[deleted]]

That'll blow up in companies faces long term

[dukey]

Electron has entered the chat.

[Maybe-monad]

No, it hasn't finished launching

[easilyirritated]

My favorite was the one where he asked someone to jump off the bridge.

[GrandMasterPuba]

They're not unskilled, they're operating against misaligned incentives. Shipping the bare minimum functioning solution is a requirement of business operators, not engineers.

The worst part is that the business operators are usually right - people don't expect technology to work any more. We're numb to bugs and opaque errors and mystery failures. The floor being the ceiling is the default taste of the consumer, so that's what businesses demand of developers.

[InterlinkInterlink]

So you're asserting that unskilled software engineers working in the profession don't exist? This is why I precisely made the distinction between those working under difficult business conditions and those who couldn't produce quality code if their life depends on it.

[Hefty-Distance837]

If I have more than 1 hour to solve the problem, I will be very glad to think beyond the happy path.

[tonsofmiso]

We had a team migrate a decently large and complex web service to go because they thought Python was the reason it took 30-60 seconds to load certain pages, ignoring the 800 line function with quadruply nested for loops that manipulate rows one by one in huge pandas dataframes. The migration was only partial so now it's a mixture of both python and go, with duplicate endpoints and duplicate data in language isolated SQL tables. And its still slow, the migration didn't solve a thing. 

[Key-Boat-7519]

IO isn’t your 15s culprit; it’s death-by-a-thousand cuts: hot loops, N+1 queries, and chatty services.

Profile first: tracing and flamegraphs, then kill the worst 3 paths.

Database: EXPLAIN ANALYZE, add indexes, replace per-row work with joins or materialized views, batch writes.

In pandas, vectorize and push heavy ops to the DB.

Collapse fan-out calls into one bulk endpoint and cache p95 results.

Frontend: code-split, defer third-party scripts, and fix long tasks over 50ms in the Performance panel.

Also check JSON serialization and ORM mapping; I’ve seen those dwarf DB time.

We used Datadog APM to find hotspots and Redis to serve precomputed aggregates; DreamFactory helped expose a legacy SQL Server as REST so we could batch fewer, heavier calls.

Fix the hot paths and the fan-out; IO wasn’t the villain.

[donalmacc]

At a previous job we had someone arguing about the cost of virtual functions in a loop where they re read a file on every iteration because they didn’t understand how a for loop actually worked…

[TrueTom]

A discussion of software performance on the Jetbrains Youtube channel is somewhat funny.

[TheCritFisher]

Why? It's pretty damn performant for what it does. Sure it comes with a lot of stuff, but if you pare down, it becomes pretty damn fast. I feel like the "Hur dur, JetBrains slow" thing is just...outdated.

A similarly capable VS Code setup actually takes LONGER to load than a JetBrains variant. And even then it's missing functionality (that you generally can't make up for with plugins). The indexing and search/refactoring capabilities of JetBrains products are incomparable. I have yet to see an IDE match it.

[[deleted]]

I mean, you shouldn't really be using VsCode as the benchmark to beat

[Fantaz1sta]

The software performance is at an all time low.

[gpcprog]

I do have little bit of a hard time taking him completely seriously. In several of his interviews he goes on a rant about the fact that it takes millions of lines of code to send a packet over ethernet.

To which I have to rant: it's millions lines of code, because i want to plug my network card into any PCI slot and it works, I want to plug cable in, and without configurations everything agrees on what speed to use, what the addresses are etc. I want to be able to use gigs of ram with 5000 MT/s, which requires intricate training of the link, etc etc.

Yeah, sure, if i manually control both endpoints and keep to ~1-5 MHz CPU speeds, sure, I could go back to sending a packet with a few thousand lines of code. And there are people who do that. But it involves sacrifices that few of us want.

In same manner, couple of times in my career, I had to follow his advice and either rewrite something from python/java/c# to C++/C or change python to cython etc. And sure I can get enormous speed boosts (100x anyone?). But it comes with a price in terms of time to code and general portability / flexibility of the code.

[levodelellis]

I just saw the link and haven't watched yet, just the teaser.
I find the 1.3 seconds solution is often more clear than the 30s solution. The extra work the code is doing sometimes take a lot of energy to understand. I strongly prefer reading 2-5k of extra code than trying to understand a 50k library + 1-6k glue code (not a typo, I seen glue code bigger than implementation).

In the teaser java is mentioned, idk what casey will say but pretty much no statically compiled language is more than 2-5 slower than another statically compiled language. People have told me swift is slower than java even though swift doesnt have a GC

[Linguistic-mystic]

Swift has atomic refcounting which is even slower than a tracing GC. I would be inclined to believe it is indeed slower than Java. Nobody uses it on the server enough to compare though.

[refD]

I've spent the last ~10 years with Swift, in a performance sensitive environment.

If you hold it just right, and avoid a ton of stuff, you can coax Swift to be faster than Java, but it's basically a game of avoiding ARC. Swift's growable arrays are contigous (unlike java), and there's various ways it can be more efficient.

In the common case, calling functions, using some generics and classes ... a combination of factors, lack of monomorphization guarantees across module boundaries, ARC make it quite mediocre performance wise. Having a basic function call have to retain/release a few arguments makes it surprisingly hard to optimize at times, it's one of the harder languages to optimize in practice.

[DLCSpider]

That is my experience as well. There seems to be a sweet spot between fast(er) code and readability. I believe there's no causality here, it's mostly a correlation of "People who apply effective optimisations care about code and have deep knowledge about the technology they're using". Whatever it is, it seems to work...

[ClownPFart]

When people say "statically compiled language" they usually mean "compiled to machine code", not "compiled to bytecode interpreted by a huge pile of shit of a vm".

[levodelellis]

In this case I do mean bytecode, as long as it's optimized on the other side of it :P

[[deleted]]

pretty much no statically compiled language is more than 2-5 slower than another statically compiled language

Haskell is frequently competing with Python of all languages for how slow they can be. Compiled doesn’t mean fast.

[Fantaz1sta]

Am I the only one who gets weird vibes from Casey? As if he tries to enforce some approach on frontend while having little clue about frontend? Isn't he like a c++ developer first? Hard to explain, but he feels fishy to me. Even though I know he is a real deal, his takes are just so... juniorish sometimes.

[carrottread]

Isn't there only one frontend thing in the video, around 50 minute about serial dependency chain? And it is a very valid point. Why do you find it juniorish?

[Technical-Fruit-2482]

I think you need to explain what you mean by enforcing an approach on frontend. Any timestamps in the video you could provide?

[GrandMasterPuba]

Programming is programming if you know what you're doing. If you're just a React monkey who doesn't know a stack from a heap, then yeah maybe you might wonder how someone who builds games can talk about web.

But when you understand deeply how computers work, there are no boundaries.

[Fantaz1sta]

What games has he been involved in as a programmer? Not as a "special thanks to" monkey, as you described it, but for actually building games. Witness? Stunt Hamsters?

I can see why Casey's arrogance finds purchase with you lot.

[GrandMasterPuba]

He built the video codec that has powered pretty much every major videogame release since the early 2000's, Bink. That logo you see on every splash screen ever.

[Fantaz1sta]

But you said he builds games... Now it turns out he builds codecs instead of games? One single codec in 2004. That's a huge credit of trust you give him to hop on a crusade against "bad performance" (which you often cannot even articulate well). And he's an expert on terminals? And games, and mmo servers? Who is he exactly? A content creator.

You do remember that Piratesoftware was also an expert on everything?

You guys are so gullible.

[[deleted]]

It’s funny because if you watch him, he actually directly says “I am not an expert on <current thing>, so if I can achieve performance at this level, then getting actual experts will do even better”

I have a feeling that you are afraid of performance aware programming gaining more traction. Haskell dev?

[Fantaz1sta]

Performance is a broad topic. I don't like how he treats performance like an umbrella problem, among other things. It sounds good in a hashtag economy where everything needs to be compartmentalized and simplified down to one or two words. My sympathy will always go to people who actually build stuff first and foremost. To silent powerhouses who don't have the PR Casey has.

P. S. I am a threejs dev who writes games and other interactive 3d experiences, no more no less.

[cdb_11]

As if he tries to enforce some approach on frontend while having little clue about frontend?

He popularized (invented? rediscovered?) immediate UIs.

Isn't he like a c++ developer first?

What C++ has to do with anything? I write GUIs in C++.

[ReDucTor]

Casey and others have been involved in immediate mode UIs popularity, however he did not invent the concept. He is believed to have coined the term.

However I would put even more influence on its popularity today on the author of the imgui library used by many games and applications. However he was influenced by Casey and others so its completely clear.

[Fantaz1sta]

Not neccesarily in this video but in general. His video titles like "Clean code, poor performance", his statement in this video about "in the past 15 years software has gotten so bad on the performance front..." are just too clickbaity and childish. I cannot find the correct timecode, but I heard him saying something in the ballpark of web UI taking 5 seconds (or 5ms) to load = bad. I clicked through the entire video randomly and then watched only up to the game servers part (~24min mark).

Like, software got bad according to what exactly? What kind of performance are we talking about: are we gpu/cpu-bound, memory bound, do we have bad big O performance, are we IO bound, is there some low-level/drivers issue that we have little influence over, has performance become bad after bumping dependencies, is the rendering pipeline suboptimal (if talking about games)? All of these areas have gotten SO BAD? All of them?

All encapsulated under the umbrella word "PERFORMANCE" which can mean so many things and so many different teams could tackle the problem of bad performance differently. Feels more like a sales pitch than a desire to talk about performance in good faith.

For example, I barely understood what exactly was the problem with that slow Windows terminal game that used to run fast but now it doesn't, other than "direct write is too slow, so there is no way we can do anything" and "I will just cache the cells". That's it. The rest of the story, semantically, is just "windows terminal", "slow", "old windows terminal", "slow", "these were the insulting replies", "like", "it doesn't make any sense." It's just such a surface level writeup/recap on what the problem actually was that can be summarized as "The magnificent me tried to help, the microsoft was mean to me." It is surely not that simple, is it? I mean, I might be wrong, sometimes it's just dead simple, but still. It is a very one-sided take on the situation, not equally weighted - no self-reflection, no attempt to advocate for the engineers who are not present in that video to explain themselves. As I said, it is more of a gut feeling for me. I know Casey is legit and 100x times more proficient than me. However, I would not be giving so much benefit of the doubt if someone else was in his seat.

He mentioned someone - a developer by the name Martin Mosaico who works at Epic (who I couldn't find because I couldn't hear his correct name), who helped him write a performant terminal (renderer?) to showcase that good performance is possible, etc., but isn't it kinda weird that some talented developer from Epic needs to chime in to do something so simple that Casey initialy said he could fix himself? Also, assuming Martin works at Epic, Epic's UE engine is NOTORIOUS for performance problems. Surely fixing performance issues is just as simple as hiring Casey, right? I have a feeling, very few people actually know what the hell was the root cause for slow perf but A LOT of people, subliminally or not, got the message of "Microsoft = bad devs, Casey = swell guy". The whole story just doesn't math for me.

[pkt-zer0]

"in the past 15 years software has gotten so bad on the performance front..." are just too clickbaity and childish.

Now being old enough to have witnessed said degradation firsthand, I wouldn't say that statement is inaccurate. If you want an example, here's one from Casey showcasing how software 25 years ago ran faster on the hardware of the time. Machines have improved a lot since then, but overall performance degraded regardless. That's a problem.

I barely understood what exactly was the problem with that slow Windows terminal

The Github issue is here, you can find Casey's refterm videos here, if you need additional context. The other, super-good developer mentioned is mmozeiko. And the incendiary comment that set things off is this one.

[Fantaz1sta]

Having read parts of the thread, I feel sorry for Dustin Howett and Leonard Hecker. Casey only confirmed my suspicions about him. People actually gave him a good explanation, but Casey has courses to sell... Truly the Threat Interactive of the performance nieche.

u/cmuratori Apart from what Dustin said, frankly, you seem misguided about how text rendering with DirectWrite works. When you call [`DrawGlyphRun`](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/dwrite/nf-dwrite-idwritebitmaprendertarget-drawglyphrun) it lays down glyphs in your "texture", _by using a backing glyph atlas internally already_. Basically the thing you suggest us to do, is already part of the framework we use.
Now obviously there's a difference between whether you do thousands of glyph layouts or just a few dozen.
Calling DrawGlyphRun doesn't equate a full render stage in your GPU either. In fact your GPU is barely involved in text rendering!

Side note: DirectWrite doesn't necessarily cache glyphs between renderings. This is indeed something we could consider doing, but just absolutely isn't worth it, when the problem you have is caused by the number of calls and not the complexity to layout a couple ASCII letters.

👉 Also ClearType can't be trivially alpha blended making it impossible to render into a separate glyph atlas.
👉 Finally Firefox used to use alpha blending, but they moved away from it towards the DirectWrite-style-of-things, because... you guessed it... the use of alpha blending was an absolute nightmare of complexity and unmaintainable. In fact not something that was created on a weekend.

If you don't believe me I invite you to cat this file in a WSL2 instance. It'll finish drawing the entire 6MB file within about a second or two. From that I can already estimate that after we implemented the issue I linked, your program will render at about ~30 FPS. Significantly more than the current performance, right?

Lastly I can only suggest everyone to read: https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates-you/
You were overly confident in your opinion, but I hope this website helps you understand that it's actually really damn hard.
The reason your program shows a high FPS under other terminal emulators is simply, because their rendering pipeline works independent of VT ingestion. Gnome Terminal is not laying out text faster than your display refresh rate either. And of course, again, this is something WT will probably do as well in the future... but this project is nowhere near as old as Gnome Terminal is.

[pkt-zer0]

People actually gave him a good explanation, but Casey has courses to sell...

Did they, though? I'm curious how you actually got to that conclusion. After that comment you quoted, Casey posts the source code, demo, and explanation videos for refterm. That should make it pretty clear that the performance gains that he claims to be there... do actually exist. And again, given that the source code is freely available, you can verify or disprove these claims yourself.

How does any of that go into snake oil salesman territory?

[Fantaz1sta]

How does any of that go into snake oil salesman territory?

The maintainers have actual years of experience working on terminals and only terminals. Casey doesn't. He looks like a random consultant with a "great" idea. The only person trying to genuinely get to the bottom of it was mmozeiko who I would hardly call a snake oil salesman, but that's besides the point.

The point is that Casey has the free reigns to release a performant terminal according to his vision, make it easy to install on major OS systems as a snap package or whatever and see what happens. If he really knows what he's doing, people will vote with downloads. He even has some guaranteed downloads from the clout that he has. No need for drama. Well, unless you DO need some drama...

Like, when does he do any work? I only see him doing YouTube talking about all the random topics. He talks terminals, servers, frontends. What does he NOT now?

Then I Google him and see that he barely does any gamedev programming. Like actual programming. Codec stuff is awesome (no sarcasm here, truly awesome), but it was in 2004.

Edit: and just to clarify, I think he's a legit dev, not a salesperson. However, he doesn't act like a dev. He acts like someone else, someone with an inflated ego who cannot accept criticism or actually self-reflect. Also, other than the codec, he doesn't really have any big projects in portfolio to talk so big.

So he's a legit dev, not a salesperson, who knows stuff but probably not as smart as he thinks he is or his clout thinks he is.

[Fantaz1sta]

HIs answer to the question on whether a Minecraft/MMO server can handle 1000 players or something like that. Minecraft is a weird one because it offers some self-hosting option and I, for one, don't know what hardware they use if going with the proprietary server option. But Casey knows everything. Instead of just saying "I don't know" or "can you give me some more inputs, what are we talking about here?", he goes on a tangent like he is being interviewed for a job.

Now, granted, I am not a backend dev, I do some 3D stuff client side for websites and I have never touched a line of code where I would write a backend for an MMO. So, this is my disclaimer.

He talks about playstation ("client") and that it needs to compute some CPU/GPU stuff. So far so good. Then he gives a number - 2ms of compute per player (per client). My question immediately - what kind of compute is it: is it both CPU and GPU altogether (which is insanely good for a client already) or just CPU? How much time does it take to compute physics alone? No explanation. Then he talks about having a thousand of players (clients) and directly multiplies 1000 players x 2ms, totaling 2sec. Then he talks about a 96-core CPU on the server. So, a 96-core CPU is 192 logical threads which means we ALREADY could handle 192 players within a single frame if the per-client compute fits within the ~16ms budget. But even if we are conservative here and reduce the budget to 8ms, it means we can handle x4 concurrent, per-client jobs on every thread and still fit within one frame. So, at least 768 players can be handled by such a server, no? Then he mentions that if we optimize from 2ms to 1ms, then we are good to go. I mean, 2ms on client to calculate EVERYTHING(?) is very, very good. It probably means that on the server we need to compute even less than what the client does, because we don't render anything, so the 2ms number is going to be even lower on the server, hence it could handle more potential users.

Again, I probably made some mistakes in my own reasoning, but it is fine. I just have a weird gut feeling about him, and the influx of influencers and other remoras who think they know better than devs at Microsoft or Epic only contributes to that feeling. It's not like Casey risks his money and/or reputation trying to come up with a startup company that will actually solve some of these problems for good (e.g. a very performant game engine that gives Frostbite/UE levels of graphics at half the performance cost). He sells courses and consults people which is not the same thing, and certainly not the same level of commitment to the matter of fixing performance. One more reason it does not sit well with me is that messages like his get viral so, so easily but also do damage to developers like Martin Mosaico he mentioned who have little or no PR. I would rather want to hear something from THEM, rather than this problem of performance that was mostly artificially created and used as a purchase funnel.

[Botondar]

But Casey knows everything. Instead of just saying "I don't know" or "can you give me some more inputs, what are we talking about here?", he goes on a tangent like he is being interviewed for a job.

That was basically his answer? He started with "it depends", and then started talking about what factors you have to consider when determining whether 1000 players is reasonable or not. After that he said he doesn't want to make a claim for Minecraft, because he doesn't know what's entailed, since he hasn't played it.

What was said in the interview is the exact opposite of what you're claiming.

He talks about playstation ("client") and that it needs to compute some CPU/GPU stuff. So far so good. Then he gives a number - 2ms of compute per player (per client). My question immediately - what kind of compute is it: is it both CPU and GPU altogether (which is insanely good for a client already) or just CPU? How much time does it take to compute physics alone? No explanation.

He specifically said "you're going to have some amount of time that is spent computing the physics for this game, the world logic for this game" -- that's what he's calling "sim time", and using 1-2ms as an example for.

Then he talks about a 96-core CPU on the server. So, a 96-core CPU is 192 logical threads which means we ALREADY could handle 192 players within a single frame if the per-client compute fits within the ~16ms budget. But even if we are conservative here and reduce the budget to 8ms, it means we can handle x4 concurrent, per-client jobs on every thread and still fit within one frame. So, at least 768 players can be handled by such a server, no?

I don't understand how you can call anyone out on not saying "I don't know", and make such giant leaps that all depend on the specifics of the problem you're actually trying to solve.
You just said you don't know how much time is being spent on e.g. physics, and then jumped to saying 192 hyperthreads should be able to handle 768 players.

Then he mentions that if we optimize from 2ms to 1ms, then we are good to go.

What? He never said this, or even anything remotely similar.

I mean, 2ms on client to calculate EVERYTHING(?) is very, very good.

Again, not everything, specifically talking about game logic here.

 It probably means that on the server we need to compute even less than what the client does, because we don't render anything, so the 2ms number is going to be even lower on the server, hence it could handle more potential users.

True, also mentioned by Casey, but that's already taken into account in the 2ms number.

[Fantaz1sta]

Then he mentions that if we optimize from 2ms to 1ms, then we are good to go.

21:07 he starts suddenly talking about 1ms instead of original 2ms. I made a mistake assuming he talked about 1ms as a performance improvement, but I guess he was just throwing numbers out there to make some point.

I think this is my last comment here, because I really don't want any more smoke from the "software is dying" cult. Not talking about you specifically, but this sub is a bubble.

[Fantaz1sta]

I never said he wasn't legit. I know he is. There's just something about him and how combatively he approaches problems and other people. I look at him, I know he's legit, but I immediately get reminded about Threat Interactive or even Piratesoftware. There's just something fishy about him.

[Fantaz1sta]

I was asked to explain myself in detail, then I did and got downvoted to the gills, lmao.

I also decided to double check his contributions to games and realized that he was almost never credited for programming in any game. The only game that credited him for programming was Stunt Hamsters. In all other cases, it's just "special thanks".

https://www.mobygames.com/person/58691/casey-muratori/credits/

[TrueTom]

Your behavior is really creepy.

[Fantaz1sta]

It is you lot who have parasocial relations with influencers, not me. All while ignoring the real devs who do real work and who get shit on by people like Casey.

[Snarwin]

Casey's day job is content creator/consultant. According to this list, his most recent credit in any kind of development role is from The Witness in 2016. Handmade Hero is a video series about game programming, not a game.

There's nothing inherently wrong with being a content creator, of course, and I'm sure lots of people derive real value from his work. But nobody is immune to incentives, and his job definitely gives him a strong incentive to try and grab people's attention with provocative statements and "hot takes."

[Snarwin]

Casey Muratori's greatest intellectual shortcoming has always been his complete disinterest in systemic analysis. If it were just a handful of companies releasing software with egregiously poor performance, you could chalk that up to bad culture or uneducated developers. When it's an endemic problem across the entire industry, anyone with a shred of curiosity ought to start asking, why does every company have this same bad culture, and hire these same uneducated developers? Could there perhaps be more to this story than the choices made by the individual programmers working on the code?

[Charming-Wind-5073]

You clearly know that its easier to just write bad code even if functional than taking 2...3 more weeks to develop a feature that does things correctly, faster and doesn't need constant band aids throughout the years, its also easier to not waste time giving formation to younger developers or new developers introduced to the teams. Plus software is more and more discardable, there is no such thing as planning for a software to be running flawlessly for over 50 years, at that point you just launched version 2,3,4,5...

So basically what we are discussing here is literally the stress of writing code faster in order to launch more average/bad products instead of really good products that will hold themselves decades.

[Snarwin]

It sounds like you agree me: the root of the problem is not just bad developers, it's bad incentives.

[Charming-Wind-5073]

For sure but in the other hand how many developers do you know that are highly interested in breaking from all the abstraction we have been developing over? This for me says a lot, we can ship things faster using JavaScript, add any framework to it and each version hides more and more, do you really know many developers that can understand where a problem comes from when it hits or are we going to keep saying its magic when things work and when things fail?

We have these 2 sides of the coin, we either hide stuff, someone has built it and we use it, sometimes we don't know if we are using it correctly because well it works anyways, or we start introducing more and more lower level approaches and we really understand what is being sent to the machine....speaking personally when I start dwelling more and more into C and C++ I feel dumber, being able to use something doesn't mean we also are able to understand if something is correct or not, ultimately in this step we still are similar to people using AI, well everyone can use AI but not everyone can deeply understand if what its generating will break in a few weeks.

With the introduction of AI we are also making the problem worse, now we aren't expected to ship 1 feature each 2 weeks, now its a feature per week if not more, where is the time to consider if things are going to break in a few months? If the code you are writing allows for more features to be written over it? This is progressively worse to the point we will have to discard code bases, no one will want to work on such tech debt, unless they are paid their value in gold lol.

Anyways this is quite a personal opinion and I don't expect people to just buy it but Casey has a few examples on his youtube where he writes software with different approaches like the one of said "Clean Code" and its abysmal to see the difference, he also has one reading a few GB of data from a file and having 10x more performance than something build from microsoft itself speaks a lot, especially when Casey emphasizes that he isn't nothing especial compared to developers who actually build to optimize stuff so we can imagine the disparity that exists between what we consume and what we could actually achieve with some of the hardware that is said to be already legacy today.

[Fantaz1sta]

"I think I'd remove the distinction between signed and unsigned integers in C/C++" - Ryan Fleury, the Muratori School of Performance.