sokol-samples
Vrmac
sokol-samples | Vrmac | |
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8 | 45 | |
550 | 108 | |
- | - | |
9.0 | 3.6 | |
6 days ago | over 2 years ago | |
C | C# | |
MIT License | MIT License |
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sokol-samples
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Zig cookbook: collection of simple Zig programs that demonstrate good practices
Zig currently doesn't allow chained designators and also doesn't allow to partially initialize arrays and fill up the rest of the array with default values.
E.g. the closest Zig equivalent to this C99 code:
https://github.com/floooh/sokol-samples/blob/b3bc55c4411fa03...
...is this:
https://github.com/floooh/sokol-zig/blob/a4b3c287fadd153a504...
...note how part of the initialization had to be moved out into "code".
There's a ticket about this here, but it's currently not high-priority:
https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/6068
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Building a Web Game in C with Raylib
This is a simple Pong-like I've written in Raylib compiled to WASM - https://wasm-stuff.netlify.app/pong
Source code is here: https://github.com/rrampage/skitter/tree/master/pong-raylib
It is fairly straightforward to get Raylib running in the browser. I used @flohofwoe's HTML shell file ( https://github.com/floooh/sokol-samples/blob/master/webpage/... ).
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Learn WebGPU
PS: also if shader functions could be directly defined "inline" in regular CPU code (and behind a special function pointer type), there would be no need for string literal shenanigans like this:
https://github.com/floooh/sokol-samples/blob/3f10c1a0620cec9...
(and shader compilation would happen during the regular build and would also generate regular compiler errors - with current toolchains that's only possible with a lot of build system magic)
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Next C compiler is a D compiler: Introducing DMD's ImportC
I think something along those lines (rarely used...) was also given by the C++ Committee as justification why so much of the C99 designated init feature set was left out of C++20. But in reality, all C99 designated-init 'sub-features' complement each other nicely once you start using them. It's a great way for building 'data-driven' APIs.
For instance check out this call to create a 3D-API pipeline-state-object in C99:
https://github.com/floooh/sokol-samples/blob/ad9047e228a8441...
- C in Web Dev
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Learning that you can use unions in C for grouping things into namespaces
I'm using anonymous nested structs extensively for grouping struct items, but I consider the extra field name a feature, not something that should be hidden:
https://github.com/floooh/sokol-samples/blob/bfb30ea00b5948f...
(also note the 'inplace initialization' which follows the state struct definition using C99's designated initialization)
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Nuklear: A cross-platform GUI library in C
It's an STB-style single-file library, which means the implementation is in a separate ifdef-block from the interface declarations, this allows to compile the implemenentation in a separate source file (which can be a C file), and be used in different source files (which can be C++ files).
For example (using stb_image.h):
https://github.com/floooh/sokol-samples/blob/master/libs/stb...
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Making Win32 APIs More Accessible to More Languages
C99 has made all that a lot easier, you can setup, initialize a struct and call the function taking a pointer to that struct all in one call:
https://github.com/floooh/sokol-samples/blob/89f5825ab5d3690...
The Win32 window system functions and D3D11 are actually very convenient to work with in C99, better than C++ actually.
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
What are some alternatives?
sokol-zig - Zig bindings for the sokol headers (https://github.com/floooh/sokol)
neutralinojs - Portable and lightweight cross-platform desktop application development framework
NanoGUI - Minimalistic GUI library for OpenGL
nanovg - Antialiased 2D vector drawing library on top of OpenGL for UI and visualizations.
imgui - Dear ImGui: Bloat-free Graphical User interface for C++ with minimal dependencies
vello - An experimental GPU compute-centric 2D renderer.
libev - Full-featured high-performance event loop loosely modelled after libevent
rapidyaml - Rapid YAML - a library to parse and emit YAML, and do it fast.
nuklear - A single-header ANSI C immediate mode cross-platform GUI library
sokol - minimal cross-platform standalone C headers
ArrayFire - ArrayFire: a general purpose GPU library.