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The Thirty Million Line Problem

Molly Rocket · talk · Watch on YouTube

Software performance & optimizationOperating systems & kernelsComputer architecture & CPUs

What it is

Casey Muratori's long talk arguing that modern software has ballooned to tens of millions of lines because of hardware and OS diversity. He proposes a stable ISA for entire system-on-a-chip packages and recalls when games shipped with their own boot disk.

Why Hacker News recommends it

HN recommends it, long as it is, as an eye-opening rant on software complexity and why systems became so complicated.

  • 11 people recommended it
  • 11 different months
  • 2 strong recommendations
  • first 2018, last 2024

What HN commenters said

  1. “The video is long, but it's worth watching all of it.”

    Muratori's proposal for a simple SoC ISA to replace OS complexity

    ropeadopepope, 2018-05 · Strong recommendation · in “Docker is a dangerous gamble”

  2. “Yes, modern computer systems are unbelievably complicated from the application level down to the hardware.”

    Devastating consequences of modern system complexity

    henning, 2024-10 · Strong recommendation · in “Show HN: One – A new React framework unifying web, native and local-first”

  3. “Casey Murati has a great rant about this”

    Muratori's rant on OS complexity and hardware diversity

    meuk, 2018-10 · Recommendation · in “Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]”

  4. “If you'd like to venture further into this rabbit hole I can recommend”

    Further reading on software collapse and complexity

    worldsayshi, 2019-05 · Recommendation · in “Docker is vulnerable to a symlink-race attack”

  5. “There is an argument that a lot of today's complexity in software is an (unnecessary) byproduct of changes in hardware design.”

    Argues software complexity stems from hardware design changes

    dsego, 2019-10 · Recommendation · in “Software Is Hard (2007)”

  6. “You might be interested in watching it.”

    Related talk on software complexity

    scruple, 2020-01 · Recommendation · in “Anti-patterns and malpractices in modern software development (2015)”

  7. “A quite well-known rant from Casey Muratori about a very similar issue”

    Well-known rant on a similar issue

    stephc_int13, 2020-05 · Recommendation · in “Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?”

  8. “Heres a good talk I came across in a HN comment a little while back”

    How games used to be developed versus today

    JamesSwift, 2021-04 · Recommendation · in “Tetris-OS: An operating system that only plays Tetris”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: casey muratori, operating systems, instruction set architecture, software bloat, hardware

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