And the experienced developer is Casey Muratori who is somewhat well known for being a very experienced developer. That makes it less likely that he doesn't know what he's talking about and is skipping over hard/slow features.
And he had a condescending tone from the beginning (as he always does). Maybe if he was more respectful / likable, the developers would have responded better.
I think the comment below in the github thread sums up the attitude of the developer. It's definitely not a "neutral" attitude. It's somewhat chip-on-shoulder and somewhat aggressive.
> Setting the technical merits of your suggestion aside though: peppering your comments with clauses like “it’s that simple” or “extremely simple” and, somewhat unexpectedly “am I missing something?” can be read as impugning the reader. Some folks may be a little put off by your style here. I certainly am, but I am still trying to process exactly why that is.
But by any reasonable reading, the guy wasn't "slandered".
Man, if we start taking issue with "Am I missing something?", how can we have productive, good-faith discussions? The only attitude I can associate with that is openness to learn, a genuine curiosity.
How is a yes/no question aggressive? At that point the maintainers had two possible responses:
1. Yes you are missing that ...
2. No that is the complete picture.
But they chose to side channel to a third possibility, "we are put-off by your questioning!". Excuse me what?
More relevantly, when the question is asked genuinely then - as you say - it's expressing an openness to learn.
Sometimes it is asked rhetorically, dripping with sarcasm and derision. In that case, it is clearly not furthering our interest in productive, good-faith discussions.
Far more often, it falls somewhere between those two and - especially in text - is often ambiguous as to which was intended. While we should exercise charity and hope our conversational partners do likewise, it makes sense to understand when some phrases might be misconstrued and perhaps to edit accordingly.
If you're going to read emotional content into that "Am I missing something?", I think sarcasm and derision are not the most plausible options. In this case, it seems like incredulity is the more likely and appropriate reaction: because it seemed like the person asking the question was putting a lot more thought and effort into the discussion than the Microsoft developers who were not willing to seriously reconsider their off-the-cuff assumptions.
Oh, I didn't mean that sarcasm and derision is how the Microsoft developers interpreted the phrase. I was speaking to the notion that the question was necessarily innocent and could only be interpreted thusly.
I would say that incredulity falls within the range between "completely inoffensive" and "outright hostile", and very much toward the former side of the scale. It can be hard to distinguish from feigned incredulity, which (while still far from "sarcastic and derisive") makes its way toward the other side somewhat.
"Feigned incredulity" can be every bit as caustic as outright hostility.
It's all a matter of perception and context, of course. And though you say there's only one way to interpret it, even you describe it as a continuum.
Sadly, this is all just a sad missed opportunity.
MS could have been less defensive and more open to possible solutions. The genius programmer could have slowed his roll a bit and could have been more collaborative.
I do get the sense that the "feel" in his writing eventually becomes more like "what are you guys smoking, this should be simple!"
It's not just "Am I missing something?"
It's:
"Am I missing something? Why is all this stuff with "runs of characters" happening at all? Why would you ever need to separate the background from the foreground for performance reasons? It really seems like most of the code in the parser/renderer part of the terminal is unnecessary and just slows things down. What this code needs to do is extremely simple and it seems like it has been massively overcomplicated."
Perhaps frustrated that they don't really seem to be on the same technical page?
I tend to think these things can go both ways. I feel pointing out someone's frustration in writing tends to make things worse. Personally I would just ignore it in this case.
That exact case seem a very appropriate scenario for clarifying? Microsoft kept saying something was difficult, whilst Casey knew that it was not, so really he was being polite by first confirming that there wasn't something he'd overlooked?
There's a difference between "inherently difficult" and "difficult to update this software package". My reading of this thread is that the MS devs are saying this will take them a lot of effort to implement in this app, not that the new implementation could be simpler than the existing implementation. Asking to rearchitect the application is an involved process which would take a lot of back-and-forth to explain the tradeoffs. The new architecture can be simple, but evaluating a new architecture and moving to it are not.
There's a point at which you've moved from "fix this bug" or "evaluate this new component" to "justify the existing design" and "plan a re-architecture".
Whether or not you see his behavior as polite, I guess, is a matter of how you read people and the context of the situation. That said, he did literally admit he was being "terse". I think it was counterproductive at best and rather mean at worst.
As for whether it really is "difficult", one has to ask for whom? For someone that is intimately familiar with C++, DirectX, internationalization, the nature of production-grade terminal shell applications and all their features and requirements?
And even if it is "easy", so what? It just means Microsoft missed something and perhaps were kind of embarrassed, that's totally human, it happens. It's not so nice when this stuff is very public with harsh judgement all around.
This all rubs me the wrong way. I have found the Microsoft folks to be very helpful and generous with their attention on Github Issues. They've helped me and many others out, it has been genuinely refreshing. What this guy did might discourage participation and make folks more defensive to avoid losing face in a big public way over a mistake or silly gotch-ya.
Some people prefer to communicate with less words? This is an issue that crops up often with different cultures working on a single issue.
As for difficult, the context is very much set from it being a Github Issue on their own repo, meaning there is a certain assumption of skill.
You're cutting Microsoft a lot of slack here, and it feels like you're forgetting that out of this whole transaction MS end up with free labour and bug-fixes? They choose for the setting to be very public, and they choose to let their employee's directly reply to customers with quotes like[1]: ["I will take your terse response as accepting the summary.", "somewhat combatively", "peppering your comments with clauses like", "impugning the reader."]. All of which are corporate-passive-aggression and (in my mind) are vastly more antagonistic than Casey ever was?
Casey is in fact perpetually annoyed with and disdainful of microsoft. Anyone who is familiar with him knows this.
He's been like this for years, and that's fine when you are hanging out with you buddies over a beer, but now Casey is a public figure.
Being a public figure means you are not 'every competent developer'. The reason this was made so public wasn't ms employees, it was Casey's followers.
The sequence of events he started here ended with his fans and friends on discord feeling justified (because Casey, not them, was right on a technical level) brigading volunteers and microsoft employees alike until at least one of them quit open source.
A truly ugly conclusion that could have been avoided with a more circumspect approach.
The problem wasn't that the Microsoft devs were wrong technically. The problem was that the tone of the Microsoft developers got much worse than Cassey's tone, they should have just closed the bug rather than ridiculing him at the end. If they did that the issue wouldn't have been a big deal.
I've found people sometimes take a neutral tone, especially from someone (me for example!) who is sometimes more than a bit openly opinionated, as being passive aggressive (or passive condescending if that is a thing). Perhaps that is what has happened in this case?
For those curious, what was the outcome of this closed issue? Did Casey make a working terminal on Windows outside of a text renderer? Did Microsoft incorporate his feedback?
My worry is that Casey did this technical performance for the benefit of his followers, and nothing of value was gained, except of course Casey's growing fame.
Well given how absurdly big the difference is, and the main thing he did was render on demand instead of 7000fps I think he has a good reason to be condescending and they totally deserve it for wasting millions of people's time with this shit.
They fixed it, but it was a sign of the times. Everything we've used over the decades had to be re-implemented for the web and stuff like Electron, and the people doing the implementing use such powerful machines that they don't even notice a simple blinking cursor devouring CPU or think about its impact on normal computers.
Yes, the open source volunteers and random employees deserve it. They are responsible for all of microsoft's many sins, and we should find them online and tell them they are trash tier developers until they learn their lesson, right?
Ok, sarcasm off.
This attitude is utterly toxic. People who are ignorant of how fast their software could be do not deserve abuse from strangers.
> People who are ignorant of how fast their software could be do not deserve abuse from strangers.
That's not the only valid way to frame the situation. At some level, professional software developers have a responsibility to be somewhat aware of the harm their currently-shipping code is doing.
Taking responsibility (which the developers later did by the way, even in this thread) and enduring abuse (which is also well documented here and elsewhere) should not be put on the same level.
More broadly, I'd much rather endure a slightly slow terminal made by developers acting in the open and in (mostly) good faith than the intentionally malicious software produced by actual bad actors within Google, Facebook, Microsoft et all..
"Abusive" is probably the the best one-word description of the way Microsoft and its software interacts with users. But I thing we'd agree it's a bit of a stretch to apply that to the case of a slightly slow terminal. However, it is absolutely fair to call it abusive when Microsoft tries to deny their problems or lie to their users that those problems are not Microsoft's fault and are something the users must simply put up with.
It's also important to keep in mind the vast asymmetry here. When Microsoft deploys problematic software, even a relatively minor problem will be responsible for many man-hours of frustration and wasted time. Far more man-hours than are ruined when a few developers have bad things said about them online. One doesn't excuse the other, but you can't ignore one of the harms simply because it's more diffuse.
The person that quit the project (and possibly the internet at large) wasn't a microsoft employee.
In my mind, there are two asymmetries.
* Microsoft v. Users
and
* Casey's network v. a 3-4 man open source team within microsoft
I don't disagree that the former is abusive.
However, it's my contention that this incident is primarily about the latter.
Casey, rightly, already had some pent up rage about the former asymmetry as well.
But it was a human manager/dev? within that small team, not Microsoft writ large, that got defensive about the software he was responsible for.
I believe I'd feel embarrassed and defensive too if something I'd worked on turned out to be flawed in a painfully obvious way. I can understand avoiding the grim truth by denying that the problem has truly been solved by ~700 lines of C.
Something else that I'll note here is that the vast majority of
"Your software is too slow, Here's how to fix it, I could do it in a weekend, and by the way this whole problem space is actually super simple."
tickets do not end up realizing software speedups.
Without proper context, they just sounds patronizing, making the argument easier to dismiss.
However, his experience, in games and game development tools AFAIK, might not be fully applicable to the development of mainstream commercial software that has to try to be all things to all people, including considerations like internationalization, accessibility, and backward compatibility. The performance difference that he demonstrated between Windows Terminal and refterm is certainly dramatic, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's something he's overlooking.
When I saw this mentioned on HN I immediately knew this kind of comment would be there because something along the lines and I am paraphrasing "its probably fast because its not enterprise enough" was repeated in every place the refterm was shared by different people even multiple times even after showing all the proof in the world that its in fact the opposite they almost refused to believe that software can be that much better than its standard today even to the point of bringing up arguments like 16fps terminal is better than 7500 one because so many fps would probably consume to much resources.
Before I found Casey's tone criticizing bad software off putting but now I understand that after many years of such arguments it takes toll on you.
Seconding. It takes doing some low-level gamedev[0] stuff, or using software written by people like Casey, to realize just how fast software can be. There's an art to it, and it hits diminishing returns with complex software, but the baseline of popular software is so low it doesn't take much more than a pinch of care to beat it by an order of magnitude.
(Cue in the "but why bother, my app is IO bound anyway" counterarguments. That happens, but people too often forget you can design software to avoid or minimize the time spent waiting on IO. And I don't mean just "use async" - I mean design its whole structure and UX alike to manage waits better.)
--
[0] - Or HFT, or browser engine development, few other performance-mindful areas of software.
I feel obliged to point out the destructive power of Knuth's statement, "Premature optimization is the root of all evil."
I have encountered far too many people who interpret that to mean, "thou shall not even even consider performance until a user, PM or executive complains about it."
The irony is that the very paragraph in which Knuth made that statement (and the paper, and Knuth's programming style in general) is very much pro-optimization. He used that statement in the sense of "Sure, I agree with those who say that blind optimization everywhere is bad, but where it matters…".
Here's the quote in context:
> There is no doubt that the grail of efficiency leads to abuse. Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.…
And from the same paper, an explicit statement of his attitude:
> The improvement in speed from Example 2 to Example 2a [which introduces a couple of goto statements] is only about 12%, and many people would pronounce that insignificant. The conventional wisdom shared by many of today's software engineers calls for ignoring efficiency in the small; but I believe this is simply an overreaction to the abuses they see being practiced by pennywise-and-pound-foolish programmers, who can't debug or maintain their "optimized" programs. In established engineering disciplines a 12% improvement, easily obtained, is never considered marginal; and I believe the same viewpoint should prevail in software engineering. Of course I wouldn't bother making such optimizations on a one-shot job, but when it's a question of preparing quality programs, …
Knuth's statement was basically "use a profiler and optimize the hot path instead of trying to optimize with your intuition", which is great advice. Most people heard "don't optimize at all". Something that you can derive from that advice is "have a hot path to optimize". I've seen a few programs that aren't trivial to optimize because the work is distributed everywhere.
I'm what most people call a FPGA Engineer though I work all the way from boards/silicon to cloud applications. The number of times I've been asked to consult on something in the software world on performance, where the answer to how to do it write was me telling them "rm -rf $PROBLEMATIC_CODE" and then go rewrite it with a good algorithm, is way too damn high. Also, the number of times someone asked me to accelerate something on an FPGA only for me to go implement it run on a GPU in about 2-3 days using SYCL + OpenCL is insane. Sure, I could get another 2x improvement... or we can accept the 1,000x improvement I just gave you at a much lower price.
Which of course, never really happens, because PM’s and execs always want more features, and performance is never a feature for them until it becomes so noticeably bad that they begrudgingly admit they should do the minimum to make users stop complaining.
Agreed, as a young performance oriented coder I've been often looked down by people who used Knuth almost god-like authority to dress up all sorts of awful engineering.
And of course most people don't know the full quote and they don't care about what Knuth really meant at the time.
>> I've been often looked down by people who used Knuth almost god-like authority to dress up all sorts of awful engineering.
Quick quips don't get to trump awful engineering. Just say call Knuth a boomer and point to the awful aspects of actual code. No disrespect to Knuth, just dismiss him as easily as people use him to dismiss real problems.
> I feel obliged to point out the destructive power of Knuth's statement, "Premature optimization is the root of all evil."
Except that line was written in a book (Volume 1: Art of Computer Programming) that was entirely written from the ground up in Assembly language.
Its been a while since I read the quote in context. But IIRC: it was the question about saving 1 instruction between a for-loop that counts up vs a for-loop that counts down.
"Premature optimization is the root of all evil" if you're deciding to save 1-instruction to count from "last-number to 0", taking advantage of the jnz instruction common in assembly languages, rather than "0 to last-number". (that is: for(int i=0; i<size; i++) vs for(int i=size-1; i>=0; i--). The latter is slightly more efficient).
Especially because "last-number to 0" is a bit more difficult to think about and prove correct in a number of cases.
In the office today with my copy of Literate Programming (which contains the essay in question) I can confirm that the sentence does appear in "Structured Programming with goto Statements" (it appears on page 28 of my copy). Here it is in a general context, not pertaining to a single particular example.
In support of your overall point, though, having just said "[w]e should forget about small efficiencies, about 97% of the time", the next paragraph opens: "Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%."
I'm not an experienced programmer but if I took all these maxims seriously...
If I don't think about performance and other critical things before committing to a design I know that in the end I will have to rewrite everything or deliver awful software. Being lazy and perfectionist those are two things I really want to avoid.
I find it striking that a decent modern laptop would have been a supercomputer 20 years ago, when people used Office 97 that was feature complete already IMO. I can't help this constant cognitive dissonance with modern software; do we really need supercomputers to move Windows out of the box?
We need some extra processing power to support larger screens and refresh rates. Arguably, security benefits of managed code / sandboxing are worth it - but the runtimes seem to be pretty-well optimized. Other than that, I don't see anything reasonable to justify the low performance of most software.
Uh, yah 4k, etc but most of the modern machines are still 1920x1080@60hz. Which is only 8% larger than 1600x1200 which wasn't an uncommon resolution in the late 1990's, usually running at 75Hz or better over analog vga cables. So its actually _LESS_ bandwidth, which is why many of us cried about the decade+ of regression in resolution/refresh brought on by the LCD manufactures deciding computer monitors weren't worthy of being anything but overpriced TV screens. Its still ongoing, but at least there are some alternatives now.
It is possible to get office97 (or for that matter 2003, which is one of the last non sucky versions) and run it on a modern machine. It does basically everything instantly, including starting. So I don't really think resolution is the problem.
PS, I've had multiple monitors since the late 80's too, in various forms, in the late 1990's driving multiple large CRTs at high resolution from secondary PCI graphics cards, until they started coming with multiple ports (thanks matrox!) for reasonable prices.
I'd imagine software is bloated and grown until is it still-just-about usable on modern hardware. Making it faster there is probably seen as premature optimisation.
I'd imagine perhaps this is how product teams are assessed - is the component just-about fast enough, and does it have lots of features. So long as MS Office is the most feature-rich software package, enterprise will buy nothing else, slow or not.
It doesn't even need to be the most feature-rich any more. Microsoft has figured out that the key is corporate licensing.
Is Teams better than Zoom? No, but my last employer ditched Zoom because Teams was already included in their enterprise license package and they didn't want to pay twice for the same functionality.
I think there's a story in here that most are missing, but your comment is closest to touching on. This was not a performance problem. This was a fundamental problem that surfaced as a performance issue.
The tech stack at use in the Windows Terminal project is new code bolted onto old code, and no one on the existing team knows how that old code works. No one understands what it's doing. No one knows when the things that old code needed to do was still needed.
It took someone like Casey who knew gamedev to know instinctually that all of that stuff was junk and you could rewrite it in a weekend. The Microsoft devs, if they wanted to dive into the issue, would be forced to Chesteron's Fence every single line of code. It WOULD have taken them years.
We've always recommended that programmers know the code one and possibly two layers below them. This recommendation failed here, it failed during the GTA loading times scandal. It has failed millions of times and the ramifications of that failing is causing chaos of performance issues.
I'm come to realize that much of the problems that we have gotten ourselves into is based on what I call feedback bandwidth. If you are an expert, as Casey is, you have infinite bandwidth, and you are only limited by your ability to experiment. If your ability to change is a couple seconds, you will be able to create projects that are fundamentally impossible without that feedback.
If you need to discuss something with someone else, that bandwidth drops like a stone. If you need a team of experts, all IMing each-other 1 on 1, you might as well give up. 2 week Agile sprints are much better than months to years long waterfall, but we still have so much to learn. If you only know if the sprint is a success after everyone comes together, you are doomed. The people iterating dozens of times every hour will eat your shorts.
I'm not saying that only a single developer should work on entire projects. But what I am saying is that when you have a Quarterback and Wide Receiver that are on the same page, talking at the same abstraction level, sometimes all it takes is one turn, one bit of information, to know exactly what the other is about to do. They can react together.
Simple is not easy. Matching essential complexity might very well be impossible. Communication will never be perfect. But you have to give it a shot.
Thanks for the “know the code one and possibly two layers below them” point, haven’t seen it written out explicitly before, but it sure puts into perspective why I consider some people much better programmers than others!
I started off programming doing web development working on an community run asynchronous game where we needed to optimize everything to run in minimal time and power to save on cost and annoyance. It was a great project to work on as a high schooler.
Then in college, I studied ECE and worked in a physics lab where everything needed to run fast enough to read out ADCs as quickly as allowed by the datasheet.
Then I moved to defense doing FPGA and SW work (and I moonlighted in another group consulting internally on verifcation for ASICs). Again, everything was tightly controlled. On a PCI-e transfer, we were allowed 5 us of maximum overhead. The rest of the time could only be used for streaming data to and from a device. So if you needed to do computation with the data, you needed to do it in flight and every data structure had to be perfectly optimized. Weirdly, once you have data structures that are optimized for your hardware, the algorithms kind of just fall into place. After that, I worked on sensor fusion and video applications for about a year where our data rates for a single card were measured in TB/s. Needless to say, efficiency was the name of the game.
After that, I moved to HFT. And weirdly, outside of the critical tick-to-trade path or microwave stuff, this industry has a lot less care around tight latencies and has crazy low data rates compared to what I'm used to working with.
So when I go look at software and stuff is slow, I'm just suffering because I know all of this can be done faster and more efficiently (I once shaved 99.5% of the run time off of a person's code with better data packing to align to cache lines, better addressing to minimize page thrashing, and automated loop unrolling into threads all in about 1 day of work). Software developers seriously need to learn to optimize proactively... or just write less shitty code to begin with.
while that's true, in this particular case with Casey's impl, it's not an art. The one thing that drastically improved performance, was caching. Literally the simplest, most obvious thing to do when you have performance problems.
The hiring machine merely ensures that they can leetcode their way out of an interview and into the job. It doesn't care about what they're supposed to know :)
Even something like a JSON parser is often claimed to be IO bound. It almost never is because few could keep up with modern IO and some cannot keep up with old HD’s
Third'ing: the current crop of new developers have no freaking idea how much power they have at their finger tips. Us greybeard old game developers look at today's hardware and literally cream our jeans in comparison to the crap we put up with in the previous decades. People have no idea, playing with their crappy interpenetrated languages, just how much raw power we have if one is willing to learn the low level languages to access them. (Granted, Numpy and BLAS to a wonderful job for JIT languages.)
I'd say it is almost the other way around. We have so much wonderful CPU power that we can spare some for the amazing flexibility of Python etc.
Also it's not that simple. One place I worked at (scientific computation-kind of place), we'd prototype everything in Python, and production would be carefully rewritten C++. Standards were very high for prod, and we struggled to hire "good enough", modern C++, endless debates about "ooh template meta-programming or struct or bare metal pointers" kind of stuff.
3 times out of 4, the Python prototype was faster than the subsequent C++. It was because it had to be, the prototype was ran and re-ran and tweaked many times in the course of development. C++ was written once, deployed, and churned daily, without anyone caring for its speed.
Python has nice optimised libs for that, so it's not completely a surprise for that kind of application.
If you're doing generic symbol shuffling with a bit of math, Python is fast-ish to code and horribly slow to run. You can easily waste a lot of performance - and possibly cash - trying to use it for production.
Whether or not you'll save budget by writing your own optimised fast libs in some other lang is a different issue, and very application dependent.
Worth bearing in mind that Casey has a long history of unsuccessfully trying to nudge Microsoft to care about performance and the fact that he's still being constructive about it is to his credit.
I highly respect Casey but given his abrasive communication style I sometimes wonder if he is not trying to trigger people (MS devs in this case) to push him back so he can make his point.
Honestly, I felt like the ones to start with the condescending tones were the Microsoft devs who kept talking down to Casey about You Don't Understand How Hard This Is, when they also readily admitted they didn't understand the internals very well.
I don't think they're actually contradicting themselves there. They know enough about how hard text rendering is to conclude that they're better off delegating it to the team that specializes in that particular area, even though it means they have to settle for a good-enough abstraction rather than winning at a benchmark.
Enterprise deployment of a Somebody Else’s Problem field can really harm innovation,
“Any object around which an S.E.P. is applied will cease to be noticed, because any problems one may have understanding it (and therefore accepting its existence) become Somebody Else's Problem.”
Agree. Rendering text well really is hard, if you sit down and try to do it from scratch. It’s just that dealing with all of the wonderful quirks of human languages doesn’t have to make it _slow_. That’s their mistake.
And you’re right; all refterm really does is move the glyph cache out to the GPU rather than copying pixels from a glyph cache in main memory every frame.
In my experience as a former game dev who moved to enterprise apps, game dev techniques are broadly applicable and speed up enterprise apps without compromising on functionality.
Consider memory management techniques like caching layers or reference pools. Or optimizing draws for the platform's render loop. Or being familiar with profiler tools to identify hotspots. These techniques are all orthogonal to functionality. That is, applying them when you see an opportunity to will not somehow limit features.
So why aren't the enterprise apps fast, if it's so easy? I think that boils down to incentives. Enterprise apps are sales or product led and the roadmap only accommodates functionality that makes selling the software easier. Whereas in games the table stakes point you need to reach for graphics is not achievable by naively pursuing game features.
Put another way, computers and laptops are way stronger than consoles and performance is a gas. Enterprise devs are used to writing at 1 PSI or less and game devs are used to writing at 1 PSI or more.
With enterprise apps, I also have the budget to throw more computers at a problem. If it's between 2 weeks of my time, or to throwing another core at a VM, the extra core wins most of the time.
I actually have a lot of respect for old school game programmers because they have two traits that many of us who develop mainstream commercial software often lack: a) they care about performance and not in the abstract, but performance as evaluated by an actual human (latency issues in a messaging app are tolerable, a game with latency issues is simply not fun to play) and b) they can sit down without much fuss and quickly write the damn code (the ability that slowly atrophies as one works on a multi-year-old codebase where every change is a bit of a PITA). Sure, the constraints are different, but a lot of it is simply learned helplessness.
> might not be fully applicable to the development of mainstream commercial software that has to try to be all things to all people, including considerations like internationalization, accessibility, and backward compatibility.
Windows Terminal has none of that. And his refterm already has more features implemented correctly (such as proper handling of Arabic etc.) than Windows Terminal. See feature support: https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm#feature-support
Internationalization and accessibility are very important in game development. A lot of time is invested in this and larger studios have dedicated UI/UX teams which spend a lot of time on these issues.
The same is true of backwards compatibilty. As an example, making sure old save data is compatible with new versions is an important consideration.
Source: I'm a game programmer working mainly with graphics and performance, but I previously spent five years working on the UI team at a AAA studio.
How is it not applicable when the thing at question is rendering text and rendering is the core of game development? This argument is stupid. Do you have to be a slowpoke to develop commercial apps?
My point is that a UI that meets the needs of as many users as possible, including things like internationalization and accessibility, is much more complex than a typical game UI. That complexity drives developers to use abstractions that often make it much more difficult to optimize. And in the big picture, support for these things that add complexity is often more important than top-speed rendering.
Games are typically much better at internationalization and accessibility than developer tooling though. For example this new windows console doesn't have either, but all big games gets translated to and handles text from languages all over the world.
Video games often have an international audience and go to great lengths to support accessibility and multiplatform support, ie. supporting both tablet and desktop. It's laughable how bad many enterprise UIs are that fail to handle different locales, or issues displaying right-to-left text and assuming everyone is using an English speaking standard desktop environment, whereas many indie games manage to handle these things very well.
Games usually handle internationalization and accessibility much better than most software.
This includes audio localization (something no 'Enterprise' software has ever needed AFAIK), and multiple colour palettes for different types of colour blindness.
Sometimes video games are the only software with reasonable localizations I ever find installed in a particular computer.
