3 ms·

It seems like microsoft should have just said that fixing this isn’t a priority right now, instead of saying it couldn’t be done. It's great though when someon

by agbell 5y ago

It seems like microsoft should have just said that fixing this isn’t a priority right now, instead of saying it couldn’t be done. It's great though when someone says it's not possible to make something faster, and you say “here, I made it” and leaving the existing console to scroll while you do the rest of the video is great showmanship. I interviewed Casey[1] and I learned a lot from his perspective on development, particularly not being afraid to just build things yourself from scratch and to try to understand what is going on at the level of hardware. [1] https://corecursive.com/062-game-programming/ https://corecursive.com/062-game-programming/

jiggawatts 5y ago
> It seems like microsoft should have just said that fixing this isn’t a priority right now, instead of saying it couldn’t be done. The problem is that if performance isn't a priority, and then you finish all of your features and ship your 1.0, it begs the question: when exactly are you going to make it fast? Never. That's when. Once you've shipped something, people get assigned to other projects, or new features. Worse, you're now locked in to bad architectures that too much code depends on for changes to be easily made. Casey makes the point that the Windows Console IO API is inherently bad, and using it guarantees an unfixable bottleneck. I've seen this attitude in Microsoft's software everywhere I look. They simply flat out ignore performance as a feature, and almost never come back to fix it. Easily less than 1% of the time, no matter how important it is. Even when people make a lot of public noise about some performance issue (like in this case), it quickly turns out that it is now unfixable because of the endemic apathy towards optimisation throughout that organisation. E.g.: Windows Updates. I have gigabit internet and a high-end SSD, yet it takes something like an hour to apply patches! https://borncity.com/win/2018/06/01/windows-server-2016-slow-updates/ https://borncity.com/win/2018/06/01/windows-server-2016-slow... That to me is simply unfathomably bad programming. How hard is it to download a file and copy it to a folder? The simpler code here would be orders of magnitude faster than whatever craziness they're doing. Like Casey points out, I could sit down right now and write a Windows Update that runs a thousand times faster. It wouldn't take much more than a weekend. (I'm not kidding: Prior to Windows Server 2019, all versions of Windows Update had O(n^3) algorithms operating on hundreds of megabytes of XML data that could take nearly a day to process.) Remember the Grand Theft Auto game loading performance issue that was posted here where some guy cut minutes out of the game loading time by binary-patching it? People here were estimating that Rockstar may have missed out on a billion dollars of revenue because huge numbers of players gave up in frustration and moved on to other games: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26296339 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26296339 Microsoft had their own version of this. When they released Flight Simulator 2020 a lot of people called it "download simulator" because it would take a solid day to download and install. Many people made excuses for it, but they shouldn't have. Just by inspecting the progress bar I found at least five critical performance mistakes. Again: I have gigabit internet and an SSD, yet that install took 8 hours!

by agbell 5y ago

jiggawatts 5y ago

> It seems like microsoft should have just said that fixing this isn’t a priority right now, instead of saying it couldn’t be done. The problem is that if performance isn't a priority, and then you finish all of your features and ship your 1.0, it begs the question: when exactly are you going to make it fast? Never. That's when. Once you've shipped something, people get assigned to other projects, or new features. Worse, you're now locked in to bad architectures that too much code depends on for changes to be easily made. Casey makes the point that the Windows Console IO API is inherently bad, and using it guarantees an unfixable bottleneck. I've seen this attitude in Microsoft's software everywhere I look. They simply flat out ignore performance as a feature, and almost never come back to fix it. Easily less than 1% of the time, no matter how important it is. Even when people make a lot of public noise about some performance issue (like in this case), it quickly turns out that it is now unfixable because of the endemic apathy towards optimisation throughout that organisation. E.g.: Windows Updates. I have gigabit internet and a high-end SSD, yet it takes something like an hour to apply patches! https://borncity.com/win/2018/06/01/windows-server-2016-slow-updates/ https://borncity.com/win/2018/06/01/windows-server-2016-slow... That to me is simply unfathomably bad programming. How hard is it to download a file and copy it to a folder? The simpler code here would be orders of magnitude faster than whatever craziness they're doing. Like Casey points out, I could sit down right now and write a Windows Update that runs a thousand times faster. It wouldn't take much more than a weekend. (I'm not kidding: Prior to Windows Server 2019, all versions of Windows Update had O(n^3) algorithms operating on hundreds of megabytes of XML data that could take nearly a day to process.) Remember the Grand Theft Auto game loading performance issue that was posted here where some guy cut minutes out of the game loading time by binary-patching it? People here were estimating that Rockstar may have missed out on a billion dollars of revenue because huge numbers of players gave up in frustration and moved on to other games: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26296339 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26296339 Microsoft had their own version of this. When they released Flight Simulator 2020 a lot of people called it "download simulator" because it would take a solid day to download and install. Many people made excuses for it, but they shouldn't have. Just by inspecting the progress bar I found at least five critical performance mistakes. Again: I have gigabit internet and an SSD, yet that install took 8 hours!