What games has he shipped?
Casey is professionally best known for his work at RAD game tools (a highly successful middleware provider for game development back in the day), not games he himself developed.
What he is most highly regarded for is his teaching, particularly the Handmade Hero series on YouTube, which various programmers directly attribute as being responsible for their own professional success to a large extent.
He did work on the video games Dungeon Siege and The Witness afaik, but that's not what he is known for.
He also made one of the fastest terminal emulators (refterm), purely out of spite, to show Microsoft they were full of shit in their answer to an issue he posted to the Windows Terminal github. This directly led to performance improvements in Windows Terminal.
And I never left Python, the slowest language around.
AI is only going to make the problem worse unless you know what to look for.
this shouldn't be right, wtf
When did you start using computers? I'm getting older now, and some people weren't alive when I first used a computer.
It's because the older programming approach was to just tell the computer how to do the thing - and the modern approach is to write a framework inside which you write a framework inside which you write an inefficient version of the thing because it's constrained to the tools available in the framework stack.
Old-school implementation of "scroll up": copy pixels then redraw the pixels at the bottom.
New-school implementation of "scroll up": delete virtualized rows from the beginning of a DOM table and add more to the end. Change the height properties on different parts of the scrollbar. Relayout the whole DOM, several times if you're not careful. Redraw the whole screen.
Also I learned to program in Turbo C and Turbo Pascal with its debugger and nothing comes faster (at least nothing single threaded)
Bink was the cutscene video codec for a long time and it's still the most popular option by far. Kraken compression is so good Sony worked with AMD to make a hardware decoder for the PS5 and paid for a general license that lets games use it for free. They are probably stronger than ever in terms of games using their tech and collected license fees.
True, though they've been acquired by Epic since 2021. They keep the RAD Game Tools branding, but aren't their own separate company anymore.
Oodle/Kraken is mostly the work of Charles Bloom and Fabian Giesen, a couple of other "legendary game programmers" at RAD, but who aren't quite as visibly prominent as Casey has been in the modern software developer mediasphere.
I don’t know the extent to which he contributed beyond that, but he is therefore by some reasonable definition _a_ game developer.
[1] the-witness.net/news/author/casey/