Rico Mariani
ricomariani.medium.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2021
Rico Mariani, a longtime Microsoft performance engineer, writes about performance, developer tools history, and software engineering.
What HN saysHN links it for Microsoft history, such as why Visual Studio had no 64-bit version, and for debate over his WASM+SQLite slowdown results.
22HN people shared it
4linked it in comments
24stories submitted
34story points
2 months agolast shared
2021people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Fifty Years of Microsoft Developer Tools – By Rico Mariani2 people · 9 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 2Why does Windows use /x for command line args rather than -x2 people · 4 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 3Basics, Simplicity, Speed, Success2 people · 2 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 4WASM+SQLite for Web Products2 people · 2 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 5Hotspots, Premature Optimization, Hoare’s Maxim2 people · 1 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 6I Approach Performance Investigations – By Rico Mariani1 people · 3 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 7Comspec’s Microshare: Retro Networking 1980–831 people · 2 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 8Common Performance Tuning Advice: Some Flaws1 people · 1 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 9Why I Think Rust Is the Way Forward1 people · 1 points · first shared 2023 · 1 comments on HN
- 10Summary of performance improvements in .NET 81 people · 1 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 11Securing C Code – Ante Up by Rico Mariani1 people · 1 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 12Software Performance Engineering: The Ideas I Keep Coming Back To1 people · 1 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 13Virtual Memory, Segments, Paging and Big Pages1 people · 1 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 14The C6 Days: Tools, Memory, and Bugs1 people · 1 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 15A Taxonomy of Performance Pitfalls1 people · 1 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
Tomis02 · 2023-05-19
> Code isn't worth optimizing until it either becomes a bottleneck
This is a well-known fallacy. There's no guarantee your performance problems have a single bottleneck. In fact, more often than not, your entire program is poorly thought and the only way to fix it is a full rewrite, with the associated risks.
> When I was teaching, I often used this metaphor: suppose you’re writing some system, you decide that you should avoid premature optimization, so you take the usual advice and build something simple that works. In this metaphor let’s pretend that your whole program is a sort. So you choose a simple sort that works. Bubble Sort. You try it out and it functions perfectly. Now remember Bubble Sort is a metaphor for your whole program. Now we all know that Bubble Sort is crap, so you have to eventually change to Quicksort. Hoare likes you more now. So how do you get there? Do you just, you know, “tune” the Bubble Sort? Of course not, you’re screwed, you have to throw it all out and do it over. OK, except the greater-than test, you can keep that. The rest is going in the trash.
> But you got valuable experience, right? No, you didn’t. Anything you learned about the Bubble Sort is worthless. Quicksort has entirely different considerations.
> The point here is that a small bit of analysis up front could have told you that you needed a O(n*lg(n)) sort and you would have been better served doing that up front. This does not mean you have to microtune the Quicksort up front.…
leoc · 2025-11-28
(Meanwhile, apparently MS itself continued using SLM, the in-house source-control system which had been commercialised as MS Delta, internally until about 2000. https://wiki.c2.com/?MicrosoftDelta https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180122-00/?p=97855 https://ricomariani.medium.com/super-brief-notes-on-early-source-contr… https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44255526 )
ArrayBoundCheck · 2022-07-13
Varied? You're joking they're all math
This guy found sqlite to be 19x slower. https://ricomariani.medium.com/wasm-sqlite-for-web-products-a86bb172f8…
codespin · 2021-04-19
The architect who was responsible for that has a recent blog post on it: https://ricomariani.medium.com/visual-studio-why-is-there-no-64-bit-ve…