Top all-time · #905
Casey Muratori
Personal blog · computerenhance.comprogrammingsystems
Casey Muratori writes Computer, Enhance!, a personal blog at computerenhance.com about programming and systems. Since 2022, 75 different Hacker News readers have linked it 104 times, most often ““Clean” Code, Horrible Performance”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-27, and you can follow it by feed.
Programming Courses and Interviews, by Casey Muratori. Click to read "Computer, Enhance!", by Casey Muratori, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.
Most-linked posts?
- “Clean” Code, Horrible Performance14 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2023-02-28
- Computer, Enhance - Performance-Aware Programming Series10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2022-11-22
- Performance-Aware Programming Series5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-02-14
- The Case of the Missing Increment4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-09-27
- Performance-Aware Programming Series Begins February First by Casey Muratori4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-01-27
- Zen, CUDA, and Tensor Cores, Part I: The Silicon4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-09-03
- Computer, Enhance: Waste3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-02-02
- Why isn't there a CreateProcess that completely isolates Windows processes?3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-07-27
- Welcome to the Performance-Aware Programming Series3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-02-01
- An Interview with Zen Chief Architect Mike Clark3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-03-24
What Hacker News says?
At some point "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" morphed into "optimization is evil". Your PR will always get shot down if it tries to improve perf by making code less clean. Imagine applying this handbrake to every single layer of every single thing running on your computer https://www.computerenhance.com/p/clean-code-horrible-perfor...
Comment linking /p/clean-code-horrible-performance
on “macOS Tahoe”Submitted Turns are better than radians as a story · 699 points
HN discussionThere's a nice interview with Mike Clark where he talks about this a bit. His take basically matches this. He says that, in his view, any efficiency benefits of ARM are just that's been the market for ARM. In his view, if x86 had a market motive for ARM levels of efficiency, they'd be able to deliver it. But, historically, the x86 market wants performance more than efficiency, so that's what it gets. https://www.com…
Comment linking /p/an-interview-with-zen-chief-architect
on “AMD CEO sees chips from TSMC's US plant costing 5%-20% more”Submitted The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-Five Year Mistake as a story · 234 points
HN discussionI'd recommend: https://www.computerenhance.com The author has a strong game development (engine and tooling) background and I have found it incredibly useful. It also satisfies the requirement for "A genuine fear, hate, and anger, towards unnecessary allocations, copies, and other performance killers."
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on “C++ patterns for low-latency applications including high-frequency trading”Submitted Zen, CUDA, and Tensor Cores, Part I: The Silicon as a story · 175 points
HN discussionFor Elixir specifically, I liked Dave Thomas’ Elixir for Programmers. https://codestool.coding-gnome.com/courses/elixir-for-progra... For learning about performance and low level stuff, Casey Muratori’s Performance Aware Programming course has been great. https://computerenhance.com For higher level software design stuff (beyond just GoF patterns), check out James Koppel’s writing at https://www.pathsensitive.com/ a…
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on “Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?”Submitted An Interview with Zen Chief Architect Mike Clark as a story · 151 points
HN discussionHello, recently I've enjoyed Casey Muratori's Performance-Aware Programming course[0]. You could read Algorithms for Modern Hardware[1] to learn similar set of stuff though. Casey's course is aimed at bringing beginners all the way to a nearly-industry-leading understanding of performance issues while the book assumes a bit more knowledge, but I think a lot of people have trouble getting into this stuff using a book…
Comment linking /p/welcome-to-the-performance-aware
on “Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?”Submitted Performance-Aware Programming Series as a story · 122 points
HN discussionCasey Muratori did many lectures. Check out his yt page playlist. Start with the one titled software quality https://www.youtube.com/@MollyRocket/playlists I heard good things about his course https://www.computerenhance.com/ Agner Fog manuals are good too https://www.agner.org/optimize/#manuals A site to look up instruction timings is https://uops.info/table.html
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on “Ask HN: How can I learn about performance optimization?”Submitted The Problem with RISC-V V Mask Bits as a story · 92 points
HN discussionhttps://www.computerenhance.com/
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on “Ask HN: How can I learn about performance optimization?”Submitted The Case of the Missing Increment as a story · 80 points
HN discussionCode is run more than it is read especially if you count users. And so-called "clean" code is a performance disaster[0]. It's also, if that link is an accurate representation of what "clean" code is, a readability disaster. The more readable code, in my opinion anyway, is the version that is also an order of magnitude faster. [0]: https://www.computerenhance.com/p/clean-code-horrible-perfor...
Comment linking /p/clean-code-horrible-performance
on “I love programming but I hate the programming industry”Submitted Why can't we have raw UDP in JavaScript? as a story · 72 points
HN discussionThis is great, nice work! I just recently started going through a performance programming course ( https://computerenhance.com/ ) and have learned about SIMD and other techniques and it is awesome to see something out in the wild.
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on “SIMD in Pure Python”Submitted A Brief Note on the CrowdStrike Outage and "Tech Influencer" YouTube as a story · 20 points
HN discussionThis does not account for frequency scaling on laptops, context switches, core migrations, time spent in syscalls (if you don’t want to count it), etc. On Linux, you can get the kernel to expose the real (non-“reference”) cycle counter for you to access with __rdpmc() (no syscall needed) and put the corrective offset in an memory-mapped page. See the example code under cap_user_rdpmc on the manpage for perf_event_op…
Comment linking /p/halloween-spooktacular-day-8-mmozeikos
on “OpenBSD is so fast, I had to modify the program slightly to measure itself”Submitted The Case of the Missing Increment as a story · 15 points
HN discussionI just encountered the term "The Ultimate Sadness" reading https://www.computerenhance.com/p/the-case-of-the-missing-in... immediately before this post and I feel like you've found an even worse sadness to deal with on a regular basis. My sympathies, and I appreciate your willingness to wade through neck deep licensing excrement to produce something that still works.
Comment linking /p/the-case-of-the-missing-increment
on “Show HN: A macOS app to prevent sound quality degradation on AirPods”Submitted Why isn't there a CreateProcess that completely isolates Windows processes? as a story · 13 points
HN discussionThis interview with AMD Zen chief architect Mike Clark validated that the efficiency gains are not due to ISA https://www.computerenhance.com/p/an-interview-with-zen-chie...
Comment linking /p/an-interview-with-zen-chief-architect
on “AMD claims Arm ISA doesn't offer efficiency advantage over x86”Submitted Performance Excuses Debunked as a story · 10 points
HN discussionAt computerenhance.com[0] Casey Muratori shows that memory mapped files actually perform worse at sequential reads, which is the common case for file access. That’s because the CPU won’t prefetch data as effectively and has to rely on page faults to know what to read next. With regular, sequential file reads, the CPU can be much smarter and prefetch the next page while the program is consuming the previous one. [0]…
Comment linking /p/memory-mapped-files
on “How memory maps (mmap) deliver faster file access in Go”Submitted The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-Five Year Mistake as a story · 8 points
HN discussionI'm taking Casey Muratori's online class : https://www.computerenhance.com/p/table-of-contents The goal of the course is to give people a feeling for how fast code can be by teaching how it runs at the cpu level. I like it so far.
Comment linking /p/table-of-contents
on “Ask HN: What Are You Learning?”Submitted Byte Positions Are Better Than Line Numbers as a story · 8 points
HN discussionGive Performance-Aware Programming series by Casey Muratori a try! https://www.computerenhance.com/p/table-of-contents
Comment linking /p/table-of-contents
on “Ask HN: Going low-level – what to learn next?”Submitted The Big Oops: Anatomy of a Thirty-Five Year Mistake as a story · 7 points
HN discussion
