scratch VS cw

pbmview, an image viewer (windows subsystem).

For comparison (for those following along): https://github.com/skeeto/scratch/blob/master/parsers/qoi.c https://github.com/skeeto/scratch/blob/master/parsers/ini.c

Another option I learned a couple years ago is embedding a UTF-8 manifest ([details])[https://github.com/skeeto/scratch/tree/master/libwinsane]. Also put the console in UTF-8 mode (SetConsoleOutputCP(CP_UTF8)), and you're done. Works on Windows 10 and later. This covers everything: argv is UTF-8 and fopen accepts UTF-8 paths. (This is exactly how CRTs should have worked all along.)

I was thinking more about this and I realized it's quite easy to do it in arbitrary precision, so here's my take: https://github.com/skeeto/scratch/blob/master/misc/bswap.c

As was linked from my QOI article, here's my full decoder with comments: qoi.c. Each pixel decodes to a 32-bit integer, ABGR. That corresponds to SDL's SDL_PIXELFORMAT_ABGR8888. SDL_UpdateTexture copies that data into the texture's internal storage, and font is no longer needed. (In a real program I'd allocate it in a scratch arena, reset after initialization.)

A recent, interesting experience with function+context allocation: For more than a decade, Windows accidentally exposed part of zlib in a public DLL, and (overly-)clever applications can exploit this as a "system zlib." Though it doesn't export the "end" functions, so cleanup seems impossible. However, custom allocation works, so doesn't matter. I plugged it into an arena.

For things that are commonly and almost-ideally represented as text files, there’s a lot of Rust based alternatives are faster and have more features than the old unix/GNU tools: ripgrep, fd, cw, and you can find more in this list.

Nice, beats my old Rust wc through sheer brute force on my old 12c/24t server:

A lot of unix-y tools have been rewritten in rust, where the usefulness comes from it being faster or having more features. Examples: bat, cw, lsd, ripgrep, diskonaut, gping. Maybe you could find an interesting program to rewrite?

cw, an optionally-multithreaded bytecount-accelerated wc clone

Having written a Rust wc implementation a few years ago (https://github.com/Freaky/cw), I had a look at theirs.

It's pretty naive - a simple linewise read_until loop, a conditional to avoid word splitting and such if it's not needed, and for some reason it collects results into an array and prints when it's done rather than printing as it goes.

It doesn't support --files0-from like GNU wc, so isn't a drop-in replacement from that perspective. It also has the sadly common Rust trope of only supporting filenames that are valid UTF-8.

It doesn't seem overly slow considering its simplicity - usually trading blows with GNU and BSD wc. Perhaps the most glaring omission is the lack of a fast path for -c, which should reduce to a stat() call. Also unfortunate not to use the excellent bytecount crate to provide a very fast -l/m path.

The read_until loop also makes its memory use unpredictable compared with other wc's. If you run it on /dev/zero it will try to eat your computer.