shaders VS hn-search

It may be close to a technical impossibility, but the Circle compiler by Sean Baxter is attempting it. That's based on an aggressive "de-pointerization" (see [1] in particular for details). There's also academic work[2] to compile C++ to shaders. I agree that it's an open question how well that will work out.

Also as pointed out elsethread, now that buffer device address is starting to land, the friction to compile pointer-intense C++ code should decrease even more. These are exciting times!

[1]: https://github.com/seanbaxter/shaders#approaching-circle-sha...

[2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.14682

You can use circle c++ shader https://github.com/seanbaxter/shaders but it's limited to look linux afaik?

First we have Circle C++ shaders, which pretty much would tick all the boxes. Problem is it's closed source and only compiles host code on linux. Closed source isn't the biggest of issues actually, but prevents anyone from fixing the developers issue with interfacing with the windows ABI and getting the thing working on windows (which itself isn't something they are able to fix because windows doesn't provide the documentation to work with their ABI). However you could use it separately to compile your SPIR-V for windows since SPIR-V doesn't care about platform itself.

Yes, Vulkan GPU source is split, though technically in a way that makes it more similar to CUDA. Vulkan uses an intermediate format instead of consuming text code directly, meaning new features are easier to add and frontend code doesn't need to be passed to the vendors driver compiler. SPIR-V is like DXIL or PTX code for CUDA, basically LLVM IR for GPUs. The CUDA compiler compiles your device code into PTX code, and it's what enables you to have "non split" source code. There's even an option to have separate PTX code in CUDA. There are few projects that aim to bring Vulkan SPIR-V into source, including Rust GPU for rust (though it will still have to be in a separate file) and Circle C++ shader for C++.

My favorite use is putting user-defined attributes on data members, and using reflection to generate a UI to manipulate those values. I do it with these shadertoys:

https://github.com/seanbaxter/shaders#reflection-and-attribu...

Just mark your declarations up with custom attributes:

I'm confused what is novel about this paper. We already have unified shader programming with circle C++, with way more features, and instead of having an SPIR-V compiler, they made a source to source compiler... We have quite a few of those.

I think shader specialisation is handled pretty well in circle. Since you can essentially run arbitrary C++ code at compile time, selection and specialisation of a shader can even depend on hardware specific benchmarks. There is an extensive repo with examples here: https://github.com/seanbaxter/shaders. One example decodes a sprite sheet stored as a png at compile time and creates a specialised compute shader for it. You can also easily implement a control UI based on reflection of uniform shader parameters.

There's a project doing something similar for C++ called Circle which is pretty incredible. In its core Circle is an extension of standard C++ which adds a ton of metaprogramming facilities and other productivity enhancing features, things the base language sorely lacks like full compile-time execution of regular C++ code which lets you do anything you can normally do from runtime during compile-time (including file I/O and networking), reflection, typed enums, pattern matching, hygienic macros, list comprehensions and language-native ranges, first class paramater packs and much more.

I use them to automatically generate an ImGui interface for controlling a shadertoy here: https://github.com/seanbaxter/shaders/blob/master/README.md#user-attributes-and-dear-imgui

- Ads with Psychological tricks

Truly good websites have around 2 facts per 10 word sentence, and get instantly to the chase. Also: good websites give you the names of all their competitors/alternative websites before showing their own stuff, and give you further reading.

Right now the world of technology is supposedly more innovative than ever, but somehow Wikipedia (https://www.wikipedia.org/) and Search Hackernews (https://hn.algolia.com/) beat billion dollar search engines.

Articles written decades ago are still unsurpassed in terms of quality and ease of understanding, but the best modern websites can do is textbook explanations. It is time society graduates from boilerplate buzzword textbook culture.

Now the gems of the internet are slowly being buried beneath mountains of trash.

If something sounds boilerplate it isn't good enough.

Don't bother saying something that has been said before, and better.

>for more detail: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Oh, I see. We actually discussed Pound about four years ago - just a little back and forth about the ABC of Reading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24196681

>What's your explanation of why Pound went Fascist?

I'm not sure I particularly have one; I haven't read any of his longer political or cultural (i.e. non-literary) works. I just think it's silly to correlate an approach to translation that you dislike with fascism. Especially as I'm not sure it even makes sense on its own terms: I can only read your comment as 'lazy translator? Figures that he would be a fascist', but if I imagine the type of translation a fascist would approve of, the approach I picture is fastidious, fussy, concerned with fidelity to the point of stickler-ishness. (Isn't that from where we get 'grammar nazi'?)

And oh, well, since you ask I'll take a shy at it: my vague sense is that he became fascist because saw a society in decline due to it becoming more and more a sham society: opulence without virtue, power without vigour, money no longer tied to actually existing goods. (Of course, all of this shades easily into antisemitism.) He saw fascism as the answer; It's easier to see in retrospect that it wasn't.

"multiplayer notepad" goes back 15 years at least - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... notepad&sort=byDate&type=comment

it was used back with a popular website which opened a text document and anyone viewing could type, but I can't remember the name. That became a thing in Google Docs, Microsoft Office, Floobits, and lots of self-hosted and cloned sites.

If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at [email protected].

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.

I understand the reason for repeating these sentiments—it's the same reason why they get upvoted to the top of threads*—but repetition of this kind is what we're most trying to avoid here.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

* I've marked this one off topic now.

I was looking for it in the guidelines. There are a couple of conventions for postings. Consider a bit of prior examples: [https://hn.algolia.com/?q=show+hn]

yeah there are only three stories coming up from the site search

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=postgres+clustering

only one is semanthically correct, the other pick up the wrong version of clustering (i.e. k-means instead of multi master writes)

but yeah if one doesn't test the hard cases, how does one know it preserves semantics :D

Like dismissing the work of Feyerabend or Wittgenstein without seemingly having read either:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=tr...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...