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#visualstudio#caseymuratori#softwarebloat

Twitter and Visual Studio Rant

Molly Rocket

148K subscribers • 32 videos on Hallway

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  • Recommended by 3 people: 3 on Hacker News.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2020 to 2024.
  • An opinion. It argues one side of a question engineers disagree on.

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

157K views6 years ago3 recommendations

Tools and practiceSystems programmingPerformance and optimizationDebuggingVim, Emacs and editors

Casey Muratori demonstrates and rants about the slowness of Visual Studio's startup and debugger watch window compared to older software.

The first - and probably last - time I will seriously respond to an arrogant, dismissive Twitter post on-stream. I felt it was worth doing at least once. Esoterica: You'll notice that when I talk about how bad the Visual Studio watch window speed is, I say "default install", and I also explain part of the reason for the slowness (intentional delay). The reason that I know this, and refer to the default, is that there are - or at least were - undocumented ways of changing the delay to be lower, which may make the watch window more usable. I have not looked for these or tested them with the latest version, but if you are suffering with Visual Studio's slow watch window, and for some reason don't want to switch to something like RemedyBG, I would encourage you to search on-line for the latest way to edit the watch window delay. It may help you go less insane!

Why it's here

3 people recommend this

What people say. Engineers frequently cite this rant as a prime example of modern software bloat and poor developer tool performance.

nv-vnon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?”

It may be true that people are partially looking back in rose-tinted glasses, but there's more than just an inkling of truth to their side. Casey Muratori (game developer for the Witness) has a really good rant 1 about bloat in Visual Studio specifically, where he demonstrates load times & the debugger UI updating today vs on an Pentium 4 running XP. Whether or not you attribute the performance difference to new features in Win10/VS, it's worth considering the fact that workflows are still being impacted so significantly on modern hardware. We were able to extract 100s of times more out of hardware and gave it up for ??? 1 link to this video
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yakubinon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ask HN: Do You Use a Debugger?”

I try to use a debugger whenever I can. Unfortunately, I develop on Linux, so the debugger situation here is awful. Basically almost all debuggers are based on gdb or lldb in true Unix fashion parsing text to generate a GUI... They tend to break really fast IME, since text doesn't provide good stability/reliability guarantees (no type checking, no nothing) and even when they do work, there is a lot of visual delay in the feedback loop, which makes them a pain to use. Another problem is that often the debug builds of things at work run too slow to be practical, or they're too big to fit on the target device. My use of debugger at work usually boils down to getting and translating stack traces…
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jiggawattson Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ask HN: What makes Windows 11 perform much worse than Windows XP?”

Casey Muratori has some great YouTube videos (a.k.a.: rants) about the end-user visible performance degradation over the last two decades despite computers becoming 10-100x faster by various metrics. E.g.: Visual Studio Rant link to this video How fast should an unoptimized terminal run? link The root cause is that Microsoft simply doesn't have performance as a priority. It's not a KPI for (almost) anyone, certainly nobody in the desktop teams. Upper management doesn't prioritize input latency over telemetry or advertising "features". It's that simple. There's no pressure, no rejection of slow code, no metrics, no pride in good engineering. If it barely functions, it's good enough to ship.1 Microso…
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jstimpfleon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Playstation Architecture: A Practical Analysis”

…s like Assembly, C or C++ have a place in IoT on devices like ESP32. Short answer, Parkinson's law. When I browse the Web, open my Windows File Explorer, open Photoshop, open Visual Studio, open just a graphical application that needs GPU acceleration, or do whatever thing that should not be an issue, I find that Parkinson's law very much applies. link to this video link to this video link Wtf. Did you see how fast VS6 started on a machine from almost 20 years ago. Today I get depressed whenever I need to open Visual Studio, and I don't even know that I use any more functionality that wasn't available 20 years ago. Many many programmers (in my perception at least) are extremely dissatisfied with today's state o…
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miltondtson Hacker News • Mentions

On “Your CPU may have slowed down on Wednesday”

> Which software exactly is functionally the same yet consumes more resources? Can you give some specific examples? Here is one concrete example: visual studio startup and debugging. Source: link to this video Maybe I could start collecting examples. I never did because it is so obvious. I mean, have you never updated android/iOS/windows on the same hardware? Regarding the "exactly" part in you sentence. Why would more features equal less performance? The only possible reason I can see this happening, is if you have features that run in parallel. Otherwise it's just another callback/if etc. That is, something to be triggered by the user that should have imperceptible impact (slightly more pressure on t…
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dmitriidon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Making life easier for newcomers to the .NET ecosystem”

Tried Visual Studio 22 Preview. It couldn't run a debugger because "property program isn't defined". Apparently you need to specify some launch.json file god knows where, and god knows why. VSCode kinda works (but also creates a launch.json file somewhere). Rider just works. If it creates something somewhere, I couldn't care less (as I couldn't care less for any other IntelliJ product which tend to just work). Also. Obligatory rant by Casey Muratori on Visual Studio: link to this video
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garaetjjteon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Does Visual Studio rot the mind? (2005)”

It would be fine but it is slow. Watch window refreshes and responds to expanding trees like it is traversing dozens of gigabytes on every single action. (if you enjoy watching rants there's one: link to this video )
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Ygg2on Hacker News • Mentions

On “Unreal vs. Unity Opinion”

> Yep, a gross and incorrect one, invented only to advance an argument that doesn't match reality. Performance and ms-per-frame is still highly critical in AAA-land, I beg to differ it's not an incorrect one. AAA Titles (+ if I did play them): Destiny - Review say perf OK. Elden Ring(+) - Performance Ok on consoles on release it was a slideshow. It ran like garbage. Personally I think it's a clusterfuck GTA V(+) - Had a huge performance blunder. Released for n-thienth time. Good performance today for game that was released in 2013. FIFA/NFL/Sports game - Runs ok. It's the same game as year X-1 except with some tweaks (like microtransactions and ads). Call of Duty - Review while perf is Ok, i…
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Yoofieon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Ask HN: What is your fav “I can't believe in 2022 this still doesn't work right””

Reminds me of these videos from Casey Muratori: 30 million line problem - link Twitter and Visual Studio Rant - link to this video
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AnIdiotOnTheNeton Hacker News • Mentions

On “Criticizing Computers”

None of which can explain why launching an Explorer window takes a perceptible amount of time, or this: link to this video , or any of thousands of similar atrocities of wasting everyone's computing resources and time to accomplish nothing of note.
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norman784on Hacker News • Mentions

On “De-Bloated Windows 11 Build Runs on 2GB of RAM”

You can achieve good memory footprints with Linux, just 2 or 3 years ago I was daily driving Arch linux with bspwm as a window manager, it used only 300 mb, for me is pretty darn good, but as soon as I opened my vscode with a JS project my ram usage was at 12gb. We have a lot of bloatware everywhere, that’s pretty sad. edit: This remind me a some rants from Casey Muratori about VS0 and windows terminal1 0 link to this video 1 link
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Hikikomorion Hacker News • Mentions

On “Leveraging Rust and the GPU to render user interfaces at 120 FPS”

Casey ranting about how slow visual studio is and compares it to RemedyBG that uses Dear Imgui (an implementation of Immediate mode GUI). link to this video
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fwlron Hacker News • Mentions

On ““Clean Code, Horrible Performance” Discussion”

…n concurring, both of which were a delight to read). The reason it doesn’t sit well is that, in practice, it seems like most products don’t know what needs to be fast and so developers end up making almost everything slow. Casey gives many examples but the one that sticks out most in my mind is the Visual Studio watch window (about 25 minutes into link to this video ). The watch window lets you pin variables you’re interested in and it will show you their current values as you step through the program’s execution. Invaluable for debugging. Visual Studio’s watch window is incredibly slow, to the point that it actually has a debounce so it will stop updating when you’re stepping quickly and only update o…
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vrnvuon Hacker News • Mentions

On “I can't stand using VSCode so I wrote my own”

This reminds me of the famous Visual Studio rant by Casey Muratori link to this video And the hundreds (if not thousands :D) of rants by Jon Blow saying how contemporary software performance sucks
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gary_0on Hacker News • Mentions

On “Software Is Way Less Performant Today [video]”

Here's the video he's referencing of the 20-year-old computer where Visual Studio is instantaneous: link to this video
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agilobon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?”

No, math is major part of writing good code, but when was the last time you've seen somebody put effort into writing O(n) algorithm? 99% of programming is "import sort from sort; sort.sortThisReallyQuick". Programming is mostly writing code that just compiles and eventually gives correct results (and has bugs). You can do a lot of programming just buy copy-pasting results from stackoverflow. link link link to this video
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