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.

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inigyou a day ago | parent | next [-]

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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sirwhinesalot a day ago | parent | next [-]

I have recently gotten a 45x on a shitty vibe coded Python project by using mypyc (2x), replacing datastructures with more CPU-friendly alternatives (15x) and using some smarter heuristics rather than just brute force on top of that (45x total).

And I never left Python, the slowest language around.

AI is only going to make the problem worse unless you know what to look for.

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andersonpico 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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.

this shouldn't be right, wtf

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inigyou 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's right.

When did you start using computers? I'm getting older now, and some people weren't alive when I first used a computer.

It's because the older programming approach was to just tell the computer how to do the thing - and the modern approach is to write a framework inside which you write a framework inside which you write an inefficient version of the thing because it's constrained to the tools available in the framework stack.

Old-school implementation of "scroll up": copy pixels then redraw the pixels at the bottom.

New-school implementation of "scroll up": delete virtualized rows from the beginning of a DOM table and add more to the end. Change the height properties on different parts of the scrollbar. Relayout the whole DOM, several times if you're not careful. Redraw the whole screen.

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DanielHB 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

From what I heard from Visual Studio folk it is surprising it is not orders of magnitude faster rather than "much faster".

Also I learned to program in Turbo C and Turbo Pascal with its debugger and nothing comes faster (at least nothing single threaded)

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imron 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

VC++ 6 was an amazing IDE. My favourite of all time, with the debugger being one of the highlights. Still unmatched today.

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fwlr 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes, it really shouldn’t, and so Casey goes to great and careful lengths to fully evidence these results. This is a nuance that’s easy to miss in evangelizing “Casey Muratori content” to others. It’s easy to gloss “abjectly unacceptable performance” as “bad performance”.

	▲	Jach 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		And people still come out of the woodwork with a parade of excuses, and sometimes he addresses those too. But it's no wonder that he gets a bit brisk or blunt with people, and turns off others who haven't been following along.

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_dain_ 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC-0tCy4P1U at 21:30 for modern Visual Studio and then 35:51 for Windows XP era Visual Studio.

	▲	guitarlimeo 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Wow, modern Visual Studio is unbelievable slop

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tancop 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

"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 license fees.

	▲	DanielHB 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I remember using it to encode some videos for a school presentation. I think I needed to make it fit into a CD and play-on-double-click and Bink was the easiest tool to do it in.
	▲	socalgal2 9 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Are you conflating what Casey worked on with what RadTools worked on?
	▲	5 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		[deleted]
	▲	georgemcbay 18 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> They are probably stronger than ever in terms of games using their tech and collected license fees. True, though they've been acquired by Epic since 2021. They keep the RAD Game Tools branding, but aren't their own separate company anymore. Oodle/Kraken is mostly the work of Charles Bloom and Fabian Giesen, a couple of other "legendary game programmers" at RAD, but who aren't quite as visibly prominent as Casey has been in the modern software developer mediasphere.