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And then they usually back their words by doing things like "you claim that outputting text to a terminal emulator is a PhD level problem, so here I did it in a weekend".

Huge teams are more often than not the sign of bloat and inefficiences.

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To be fair, game developers have been rendering text on the GPU for over two decades. I've done it in college a decade ago with bmfont [1] (nowadays the engine does rasterization during import). Whoever thought was making a case with "outputting text to a terminal emulator is a PhD level problem" was really out of their depth and was making a case for unnecessary inefficiencies. Kudos to Casey for proving a point.

1. https://www.angelcode.com/products/bmfont/

I remember when that terminal situation first happened, and my main takeaway wasn't "wow, this Casey guy is a genius" but rather reinforcement of my pre-existing belief that Microsoft is full of incompetent and lazy people. Anyone who has ever dabbled in engine or low-level game dev has implemented basic GPU text rendering at some point.

Yeah, like when Blow claimed he could replace PowerPoint in a weekend and ended up implementing a presentation software that had about 2% of what PowerPoint offers.

Now there's an argument to be made that many don't need the remaining ones but to claim that you 'replaced PowerPoint' for anyone but yourself is ridiculous.

They're good at demos, I give them that.

There's a classic saying along those lines, "everyone is only using 5% of Word. The tricky part is that everyone is using a different 5%"

Originated (or maybe just popularized) by Joel Spolsky, I think?

C++ is the same way and is why while everyone hates 95% of it, no one can agree on a strictly superior language.

Casey was right, though. The windows terminal was (is, it's still there even if you use the new Terminal) atrocious. The performance is so bad, due to going through all the layers it does, which Casey exposed. And it's not even packed with features, pressing up on a new console doesn't bring you a command from history, which Linux terminals and 3rd party Windows ones have been doing for decades, even Powershell does that. The support for colors was also bad, the very limited options for font configuration, and it renders fonts as if it was Win2k... Thankfully, the Windows Terminal solves most of those, and includes tabs and other useful features. Too late for me as I already jumped ship to Linux.

> pressing up on a new console doesn't bring you a command from history, which Linux terminals and 3rd party Windows ones have been doing for decades, even Powershell does that.

I'm wondering if you're confusing Windows terminal with cmd.exe?

Windows terminal is not the shell. It's a terminal emulator. You run a shell inside of the terminal, for example you can run... Powershell.

Command history is a feature of the shell.

Imagine if he had approached it like, e.g. Bruce Dawson though, instead of coming off like an edgelord off his meds.

He did approach it correctly, and then his questions were dismissed because "it needs PhD-level research". If anything, it was clueless and incompetent Microsoft "engineers" who acted as edgelords.

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