Vrmac
lite
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Vrmac
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New Renderers for GTK
Couple times in the past I have implemented GPU-targeted GUI renderers, here’s an example: https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac?tab=readme-ov-file#vector-... https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/blob/master/Vrmac/Draw/VAA...
2D graphics have very little in common with game engines. The problem is very different in many regards. In 2D, you generally have Bezier and other splines on input, large amount of overdraw, textures coming from users complicate VRAM memory management. OTOH, game engines are solving hard problem which are irrelevant to 2D renderers, like dynamic lighting, volumetric effects, and dynamic environment.
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Was Rust Worth It?
> Part of Panama
Most real-live C APIs are using function pointers and/or complicated data structures. Here’s couple real-life examples defined by Linux kernel developers who made V4L2 API: [0], [1] The first of them contains a union in C version, i.e. different structures are at the same memory addresses. Note C# delivers the level of usability similar to C or C++: we simply define structures, and access these fields. Not sure this is gonna be easy in Java even after all these proposals arrive.
For a managed runtime, unmanaged interop is a huge feature which affects all levels of the stack: type system in the language for value types, GC to be able to temporarily pin objects passed to native code (making copies is prohibitively slow for use cases like video processing), code generator to convert managed delegates to C function pointers and vice versa, error handling to automatically convert between exceptions and integer status codes at the API boundary, and more. Gonna be very hard to add into the existing language like Java.
> "Vector API" JEP
That API is not good. They don’t expose hardware instructions, instead they have invented some platform-agnostic API and implemented graceful degradation.
This means the applicability is likely to be limited to pure vertical operations processing FP32 or FP64 numbers. The rest of the SIMD instructions are too different between architectures. A simple example in C++ is [2], see [3] for the context. That example is trivial to port to modern C#, but impossible to port to Java even after the proposed changes. The key part of the implementation is psadbw instruction, which is very specific to SSE2/AVX2 and these vector APIs don’t have an equivalent. Apart from reduction, other problematic operations are shuffles, saturating integer math, and some memory access patterns (gathers in AVX2, transposed loads/stores on NEON).
> most of these are not done / not in a stable LTS Java release yet
BTW, SIMD intrinsics arrived to C# in 2019 (.NET Core 3.0 released in 2019), and unmanaged interop support is available since the very first 1.0 version.
[0] https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/blob/master/VrmacVideo/Lin...
[1] https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/blob/master/VrmacVideo/Lin...
[2] https://gist.github.com/Const-me/3ade77faad47f0fbb0538965ae7...
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36618344
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Stable Diffusion in pure C/C++
I have minimal experience with Rust. OTOH, programming C++ for living since 2000, with a few gaps when I used other languages like Obj-C and C#.
I agree C++ is very hard to learn if you only have experience with higher-level languages like Python and Scala. I think there’re two reasons for that.
C++ is unsafe. There’s no way around this one, it was designed that way, like C or assembly. Still, with modern toolset it’s not terribly bad. Compilers print warnings, BTW I typically ask them to treat warnings as errors to deliberately fail the build. On Windows, a combination of debug build, debug C runtime, and visual studio debugger helps tremendously. Linux compilers have these sanitizers (address, memory, thread, undefined behavior) which are comparable, they too sacrifice runtime speed for diagnostics and debuggability.
Another reason, the language itself is very complicated, especially the templates. However, just because something is in the language doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to use it. You don’t need to be familiar with that stuff unless doing something very advanced, like customizing the Eigen C++ library. Don’t follow the patterns found in the standard library: unlike your code, that library has good reasons to use that template BS. If instead of templates you do something else, C++ becomes much easier to use, and most importantly other people will still be able to read and understand your code. Another reason to avoid excessive template metaprogramming, it slows down the compiler, because template-heavy code often needs to be in headers as opposed to cpp files.
P.S. If you don’t need extreme levels of performance (defined as “approach the numbers listed in CPU specs”, the numbers are FLOPS or memory bandwidth), and you don’t need the ecosystem too much, consider C# instead of C++. Much faster than Python, often faster than Scala or Java, easy integration with C should you need that (same as Rust, much easier than Python or Java), the only downside is these ~100MB of the runtime. The reputation is weird, but technically the language and runtime are pretty good. For example, here’s a C# library which re-implements a subset of ffmpeg and libavcodec C libraries: https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/tree/master/VrmacVideo
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Media Player Element now available for cross-platform apps everywhere dotnet runs
BTW, I did that too for 32-bit ARM Linux on Raspberry Pi 4, back in 2020: https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/tree/master/VrmacVideo Unlike Uno, my implementation doesn’t use libVLC and is written mostly in C#, only audio decoders are in C++. To decode video, I directly consume V4L2 Linux kernel APIs.
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Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell
Doing that for decades.
An app for Windows phone, downloaded 140k times: https://github.com/Const-me/SkyFM
Cross-platform graphics library for .NET: https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac
Recently, offline speech-to-text for Windows: https://github.com/Const-me/Whisper
At this point, I consider side projects like that as a hobby.
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Minimal Cross-Platform Graphics
I think this needs much more complexity to be useful.
For the rendering, ideally it needs GPU support.
Input needs much more work, here's an overview for Windows: https://zserge.com/posts/fenster/
Windows' Sleep() function has default resolution 15.6ms, that's not enough for realtime rendering, and relatively hard to fix, ideally need a modern OS and a waitable timer created with high resolution flag.
Here's my attempt at making something similar, couple years ago: https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac
- An MP4 file first draft
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Cppfront, Herb Sutter's proposal for a new C++ syntax
I agree about Python or PHP.
However, for Java or modern C#, in my experience the performance is often fairly close. When using either of them, very often one doesn’t need C++ to be good enough.
Here’s an example, a video player library for Raspberry Pi4: https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/tree/master/VrmacVideo As written on that page, just a few things are in C++ (GLES integration, audio decoders, and couple SIMD utility functions), the majority of things are in C#.
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Vulkan update: version 1.2 conformance for Raspberry Pi 4
To be fair, in modern GL versions they fixed some of these things. In GLES 3.1 which I used a lot on Pi4 https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/ GPU vertex buffers and shaders worked fine, GLSL compiler in the drivers worked fine too.
However, others issues are still present. There’s no shaders bytecode, they have an extension to grab compiled shaders from GPU driver to cache on disk, but it doesn’t work. The only way to create shaders is separate compile and link API calls. Texture loading and binding API is still less than ideal.
- Advice for the next dozen Rust GUIs
lite
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TextAdept
Another small, minimalist Lua-based text editor is Lite[1], and it's much less "light" cousin Lite-XL[2]
1: https://github.com/rxi/lite
2: https://github.com/lite-xl/lite-xl
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A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software
Playing with browser developer tools and always seeing obfuscated JavaScript makes me sad. I'm not a web developer, but I suspect the security gained is low enough to fall within the author's "unnecessary constraints."
On the other hand, there are projects like https://github.com/rxi/lite
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Leveraging Rust and the GPU to render user interfaces at 120 FPS
Beyond the rendering which as noted is nothing that hasn't been done before (in general) the inherent OT/multi user + tree sitter functionality is something that entices me.
I'm surprised nobody pointed out lite/litexl here either it's rendering of ui is very similar (although fonts are via a texture; like a game would) and doesn't focus overly on the GPU but optimises those paths like games circa directx9/opengl 1.3
https://github.com/rxi/lite/blob/master/src/renderer.h
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Minimal Cross-Platform Graphics
> is using pure software rendering (on top of SDL) in a rather naïve fashion
https://github.com/rxi/lite/blob/master/src/rencache.c#L4
I think you'll find that they found the naive approach was sufficiently poor, performance wise, that additional optimizations had to be applied on-top.
> But for quick hacking / porting old demos / writing emulators and also text based UI it can be fast enough.
/shrug
If you want to use it, use it. It's 'good enough'...
> if you vastly lower your expectations
- Lite: A lightweight text editor written in Lua
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Looking for an IDE with the following characteristics
How about lite https://github.com/rxi/lite
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Now that Atom has been discontinued - where to next?
You have options: - Sublime Text - VsCodium - Lite - https://github.com/rxi/lite
- 4coder editor is now fully open source
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Lapce
I like the single lapce.exe and loads reasonably fast.
But this is in a pre pre-alpha stage, so many bugs it's far too early for public feedback. It loads reasonably fast except chrome stats in top left then jerks towards the center. The start page says to bring up the command palette which I was unable to navigate via keyboard.
The open file dialog takes an eternity to load the first time, the path is in a text box that's not editable. Focusing a text file gives an Insert cursor which is in text mode, there's a noticable slow delay before writing the first character, text selection is non existent so lacks basic text editing features.
There is a built-in terminal however there's only a single tab.
The only thing that gives it potential is that the folder/file browsing is super quick even with a node_modules folder so it might be built on efficient rendering that can be improved.
Even for such a basic editor it's 38mb download. For a far smaller + more complete editor checkout Lite:
https://github.com/rxi/lite
What are some alternatives?
neutralinojs - Portable and lightweight cross-platform desktop application development framework
lite-xl - A lightweight text editor written in Lua
nanovg - Antialiased 2D vector drawing library on top of OpenGL for UI and visualizations.
doom-emacs - An Emacs framework for the stubborn martian hacker [Moved to: https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs]
vello - An experimental GPU compute-centric 2D renderer.
Visual Studio Code - Visual Studio Code
rapidyaml - Rapid YAML - a library to parse and emit YAML, and do it fast.
Apache NetBeans - Apache NetBeans
sokol - minimal cross-platform standalone C headers
theia - Eclipse Theia is a cloud & desktop IDE framework implemented in TypeScript.
NanoGUI - Minimalistic GUI library for OpenGL
LSP-pyright - Python support for Sublime's LSP plugin provided through microsoft/pyright.