cyanide

Few people care more about software performance than @cmuratori. Give him a few minutes of your attention with this episode, and he'll convince you to learn to read Assembly (no, really, I finally started to read it, it's really not that scary, esp with an AI that can help explain the sequences). Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 05:17 Games at Microsoft 12:52 Building games 16:00 Why performance matters 27:12 Why you should learn to read assembly 30:36 Designing for optimization 42:51 How to get better at writing performant software 49:04 Understanding how the CPU works 55:53 Building games then and now 1:05:56 How game engines changed building games 1:10:48 Why new games compete with old games 1:13:25 GTA 6: why is it taking so long? 1:16:59 Casey's critique of clean code 1:21:48 Casey's take on TDD 1:24:30 What is good code? 1:27:32 What makes a good software engineer? 1:33:56 Why Casey doesn't code with AI 1:39:01 AI's impact on the game industry 1:44:43 AI and burnout 1:50:21 Why you should read papers Brought to you by: • @AntithesisHQ – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages antithesis.com/pragmatic • @sentry – application monitoring software considered “not bad” by millions of developers sentry.io/pragmatic • @turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable turbopuffer.com/pragmatic Three interesting things we talked about: 1. Is performance starting to matter to businesses? Enterprise software buyers care mainly about cost, compliance, and capabilities – but not performance. Even so, there are some products gaining major popularity and market share due to their performance, such as File Pilot (next-gen file explorer) and the Blick video editor. Is the tide turning? 2. Profiler-driven performance optimization is the wrong way to optimize The standard way of optimizing is to profile the application, tweak hotspots, then check if the stats have improved. But this only finds a local minimum; Casey says every engineer he’s worked with who was a great “optimizer” began by establishing what the hardware could theoretically do, and then did not stop until they’d closed the gap to that performance level. 3. Take a grain of salt with conventional wisdom that premature optimization is the “root of all evil” Many devs use it as an excuse to delay performance optimization, but Casey says that not optimizing in time could mean that only performance hotspots can be fixed later, and not the architectural issues that create poor performance. Architect your system to be performant, or you’ll have trouble solving problems without a rewrite!