Casey Muratori

@casey-muratori · 37 positions · On ppll ↗

Game and engine programmer, creator of Handmade Hero and of the Computer Enhance course on performance-aware programming, and a long-standing critic of object-oriented design orthodoxy. He worked on the user interface of Jonathan Blow's The Witness, which is the codebase his writing on compression-oriented programming draws its examples from.

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What Casey Muratori says most about

software performance 20

The software industry is massively underperforming its hardware, by factors of ten to a hundred, and people refuse to believe the numbers when you say them.
Hand-optimizing hot spots barely matters any more, because the libraries are already fast and CPUs are extremely good at running bad code quickly; what is left is architecture.

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compilers 3

Source code in any language tells you nothing about what the CPU is actually asked to do; only the compiler's assembly output does, and reading it is a skill every serious programmer should have.
What clean-code polymorphism really costs you is not the virtual call but the optimizations the compiler can no longer perform once it cannot see what runs.

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software quality 2

Development should never be driven by tests: how much to test is an engineering decision to be costed project by project, not a methodology to adopt by default.
Code written to be reusable before there is anything reusing it is likely to be reusable in the wrong way.

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video games 2

Graphics have stopped selling games: most of the market by revenue no longer cares how a game looks, so new games now compete with the entire back catalogue.
Once the barrier to making a game collapsed, making a good game stopped being enough: no game gets noticed organically any more, so shipping without a marketing plan is unwise.

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