ssgl VS processing

It's here. I made a post about it too, there's some details in the comments on how this works.

Here I'm doing GLSL and running it via OpenGL on top of my own helper library (the main branch of the code repo explains it pretty well). For me it's the easiest way to code for a GPU by a wide margin, but I guess that's to be expected. For performance, the most important things here are using shared memory and persistent threads so there are less global reads and especially atomics (I wanted to do a local reduction on the end result but for whatever reason subgroup operations don't work on 64-bit integers and I didn't bother to write it out with shared memory)

Some of it is fine-grained control, some is how it’s nice to be able to treat shaders as separate entities, some is just different preference. But no actual limitation, in fact I built a thing for that on top of OpenGL.

Include is probably your best bet there. Personally I use this system that I made, which borrows the single source programming model from CUDA so that shaders are just reinterpreted C++ code that can sit within the rest of the program. This means I can call the same functions from C++ and the shaders, and includes work just like any other includes.

I also already have a library that gives compile time errors, by having the shaders just be a part of the C++ program :) This would also benefit slightly from having embedded files, as I wouldn't need to do the runtime hacks that are currently in place.

As a side note, you may be interested in this library that someone posted on /r/GraphicsProgramming awhile ago. Haven't used it, but it seems like it might fit in with your general design philosophy.

Because mine is the most faithful reproduction of GLSL I've seen. Almost all features work the same in C++ as they do in shaders -- the notable difference is that you can't pass swizzles by reference, and inout arguments have to be defined with a slightly wonky syntax.

The culmination of my attempts at wrapping OpenGL is ssgl, which foregoes basically all binding and lets you write shaders along C++ with semi-automatic lambda capture. The underlying implementation is filled with dragons, but from personal experience it's just bonkers how much nicer it is to work with compared to any other approach I've used.

I have a library that due to its nature (it defines a domain-specific language within C++) has to define macros for a bunch of words that some standard headers use as variable names. This causes the standard headers to completely break if my library headers are included before them, and the errors are less than intuitive. Is there a simple way to produce a meaningful error (like "library header must be included last") if a standard header is included after the library headers? Googling didn't help much, and at a quick glance standard headers don't appear to contain too many extremely common names that I could #define to static_assert or something. I'm fine with the sensible error being limited to a few of the big standard implementations, so the option of just going through the headers and finding enough such names is doable, but it'd be nice to have a cleaner solution.

Yeah, the state machine aspect does make debugging cumbersome, and it's very easy to forget some option in the wrong setting. But I don't fully agree with "a collection of spells", I think the steps to achieve something are (mostly) pretty straight forward. Though maybe memories go sweeter with time, I haven't written any binding code after making ssgl :-)

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I disagree. There are so many creative tools that are now online that you can access from your browser that were not envisioned in the original web. It is obviously true that not EVERY website is about creation (but to expect that seems unreasonable?), but even Wikipedia is a collaborative project.

Examples include products from big vendors like Adobe's Photoshop, to smaller products like SketchUp, to more indy generative art tools like https://processing.org and Strudel (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39924210).

Would processing[0] be a good fit? It's designed to be easy to use and learn but powerful enough for professional use. Very quick to get cool stuff moving on a screen and the syntax is Java with a streamlined editing environment.

[0] https://processing.org/

I would personally use the language Processing. It's the one I use the most. And it's relatively easy to start drawing text, squares, and do other kinds of things. (It's kind of like java, but without all the boilerplate code)

Processing (P5) had this: you can select any string of text in its IDE anl search for it in the docs, and if it's one of the built-in functions or constants it will open the associated static html page that came installed with the software, so no internet nor server required. And despite being offline you can still navigate the docs too. This feels a lost basic skill in static site generation these days.

It was the only creative coding framework that had complete, offline documentation like that at the time I might add. OpenFrameworks is still mostly autogenerated stubs for example.

IMO it was one of the things that gave Processing an edge in educational contexts over all alternatives. I was pretty sad to see p5.js not fully continue that tradition and require that you go online to read the docs, and that it's not a static website but that text is rendered with javascript when you open it (still complete and with examples though).

https://processing.org/

https://p5js.org/

Processing is very cool, especially if you like graphics.

https://processing.org/

Processing is a flexible software sketchbook and a language for learning how to code. Since 2001, Processing has promoted software literacy within the visual arts and visual literacy within technology. There are tens of thousands of students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists who use Processing for learning and prototyping.

And it's not even their IDE. They just slapped some AVR compilers into Processing

https://processing.org/