metal-cpp
Apollo-11
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metal-cpp | Apollo-11 | |
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16 | 127 | |
249 | 56,371 | |
- | - | |
3.3 | 4.6 | |
3 months ago | about 1 month ago | |
C++ | Assembly | |
Apache License 2.0 | GNU General Public License v3.0 or later |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
metal-cpp
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Nitro: A fast, lightweight 3MB inference server with OpenAI-Compatible API
My understanding is the proliferation of “XYZ-cpp” AI frameworks is due to the c++ support in Apple’s gpu library ‘Metal’, and the popularity of apple silicon for inference (and there are a few technical reasons for this): https://developer.apple.com/metal/cpp/
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Show HN: C-ocoa, Write iOS/macOS apps in any language, with a generated C API
This is basically also what the "official" C++ API for Metal does (https://developer.apple.com/metal/cpp/), it's an automatically generated bindings wrapper which calls into ObjC runtime functions.
I also dabbled a bit with this idea by parsing clang AST-dumps of macOS system headers:
https://github.com/floooh/objc-ast-experiments
Unfortunately this is very brittle, and also broke on ARM CPUs, I guess the shim code needs some ABI adjustments (famously, objc_msgSend has multiple "ABI shapes": https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/objc_msgsends-new-prototype.h...).
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What's the best way to learn Metal?
There's official C++-interface: https://developer.apple.com/metal/cpp/
- What are some alternatives to OpenGL for Mac
- Opinion for graphic api's?
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A brief interview with Tcl creator John Ousterhout
It doesn't matter if the project driven by Microsoft or not, the cat (of automatically generated language bindings) is out of the bag. E.g. Zig is using the same approach without being an official MS project: https://github.com/marlersoft/zigwin32, and Apple has an automatically generated C++ API for Metal (https://developer.apple.com/metal/cpp/).
In the future, the question won't be "what language do I need to learn to code on this platform", but instead "are there language bindings for my favourite language".
- Cross platform low level graphics API suitable for game development?
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GCC now includes Modula-2 and Rust. Do they work on OpenBSD?
this? https://developer.apple.com/metal/cpp/
Doesn't it just use objc/runtime.h and if anything is missing you can just add your custom api calls?
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A learning path for Vulkan that focuses on concepts?
Metal has C++ bindings (which cover a full app lifecycle so you don’t have to touch Objective-C/Swift at all) but they’re based on the Objective-C memory model. There are some helper structs mimicking shared pointers, but you’ll still need to understand the basics of how an autorelease pool is used to avoid memory leaks and/or bad access crashes.
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CTO of Azure declares C++ "deprecated"
On https://developer.apple.com/metal/cpp/ check Foundation folder and all those nice Object::sendMessage().
Apollo-11
- Original Apollo 11 Guidance Computer (AGC) source code
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Mistral CEO confirms 'leak' of new open source AI model nearing GPT4 performance
I often like to think about https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11 as an analogy. It's public domain with available source, in the assembly language in which it was written... so it fills all the definitions of OSS!
But the process by which that code arose, the ability to modify any line and understand its impact (heh) on a real execution environment, is dependent on a massive process that required billions of dollars and thousands of the smartest people on the planet. For all intents and purposes, without that environment, it is as reliably modifiable as an executable binary in any other context - or a set of weights, in this one!
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Can a Transformer Represent a Kalman Filter?
But can a Transformer run on the Apollo Guidance Computer?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer
Frequency 2.048 MHz
Memory 15-bit wordlength + 1-bit parity
2048 words RAM (magnetic-core memory)
https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/blob/master/Luminar...
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TIL an Oxford University physicist claimed that for the moon landing conspiracy to be true, around 411,000 people would’ve needed to keep it secret. He also suggests the hoax would’ve broken down in 3.68 years.
You can look at the Colossus 2A code written by Margaret Hamilton and her very small team on Github.
- "Temporary" code in Apollo 11's lunar landing guidance equations (1969)
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SpaceX poised for 'mid-November' launch of second Starship test flight
"Burn Baby Burn" might be even more apt!
https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/blob/master/Luminar...
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Software Disenchantment
My more positive take on this: our runtime environments are bloated because we have ways to enable trust, stability, and iteration speeds that people wouldn't have dreamed of in years past.
Your Notion desktop app and Google Chrome both support embedding & displaying multimedia content that's controlled by people that you may not trust, but they can draw on decades of engineering to sandbox that content. They can independently be updated without worrying about a centralized `flexbox.dll` that may or may not be the right version. They do not require building a new executable to make the vast majority of UI changes. And the cost is simply storage space and initial download bandwidth.
We can look with rose-colored glasses at an era of "every byte of assembly has been hand-crafted." I, too, look in awe at what was achieved with such things as https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/tree/master/Luminar... . But that software, per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer#Softw..., took 1400 person-years of work.
We have to compare apples to apples - the abstractions we have today would not prevent such a piece of software from being built, and indeed would allow us to build that exact software, even bit-for-bit the same, much more easily due to abstractions on our tooling itself. We have not departed a world where, given a nation-state budget, one could pay for 1400 person-years of work and create the AGC (though one might make arguments about the distraction levels of modern society, but that's a different thing entirely).
But we also exist in a world where I can build and ship a cross-platform video chat application in an afternoon (well, not counting app store approvals) and be reasonably confident that my app will be compatible with, and secure on, practically any computer or mobile device sold in the past half decade, regardless of how many other apps may have been installed on each device. I'd venture to say that Apollo engineers would, and do, find this aspect of our world fascinating, too.
- NASA's Voyager Team Focuses on Software Patch, Thrusters
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Margaret Hamilton stands next to her handwritten code for the lunar missions
Thankfully it was eventually migrated to GitHub
What are some alternatives?
MoltenVK - MoltenVK is a Vulkan Portability implementation. It layers a subset of the high-performance, industry-standard Vulkan graphics and compute API over Apple's Metal graphics framework, enabling Vulkan applications to run on macOS, iOS and tvOS.
DOOM - DOOM Open Source Release
Cinder - Cinder is a community-developed, free and open source library for professional-quality creative coding in C++.
microwatt - A tiny Open POWER ISA softcore written in VHDL 2008
LearnOpenGL - Code repository of all OpenGL chapters from the book and its accompanying website https://learnopengl.com
midimonster - Multi-protocol control & translation software (ArtNet, MIDI, OSC, sACN, ...)
objc4
WebKit - Home of the WebKit project, the browser engine used by Safari, Mail, App Store and many other applications on macOS, iOS and Linux.
metal-rs - Rust bindings for Metal
Godot - Godot Engine – Multi-platform 2D and 3D game engine
OpenFrameworks - openFrameworks is a community-developed cross platform toolkit for creative coding in C++.
GraphRedex - An interactive semantics explorer