pixie VS rfcs

We have written pixie: https://github.com/treeform/pixie . Pixie is a 2D graphics library similar to Cairo and Skia written entirely in Nim. Which I think is a big accomplishment. It even has python bindings: https://pypi.org/project/pixie-python/

I made it because I really like pixie/boxy/windy combo, but there is no gamepad support built-in.

With Nim, you can continuously optimize and improve the hot spots in your code. For example, in the Pixie graphics library, path filling started with floating point code, switched to floating point SIMD, then to 16-bit integer SIMD. Finally, this SIMD was written for both x86 and ARM.

The author Fidget actually has a number of other great libraries that are part of the rendering stack. Notably, Pixie for text and shape rendering in 2D, Boxy for rendering textures to the GPU via opengl, and then Windy for an OS window context and user events, and a number of other libraries related to 3D rendering.

Perhaps not the "best" source code I've ever read, but libVF.io had some beautiful code for what's generally gnarly system-glue code. The iommu setup code is a good example and inspires me to think that system-glue code doesn't need to be gross or impenetrable: https://github.com/Arc-Compute/LibVF.IO/blob/master/src/libv...

Another one I've appreciated reading (and learned more about 2d graphics from) is Pixie, a 2d graphics library written in Nim. Here's the implementation of a fair subset of SVG paths: https://github.com/treeform/pixie/blob/master/src/pixie/path...

And one last one for basic algorithms: https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/blob/version-1-6/lib/pure/al...

Of course Knuth's original code is still some of the best classic code. K&R's original C book is a classic.

I recently helped work on a new open source JPEG decoder in Nim. (Over here on GitHub: https://github.com/treeform/pixie/blob/master/src/pixie/file...)

This video was extremely helpful to understand the "why" of all the things the spec was trying to explain. It made a huge difference in us being able to get things working.

We talk a bit about JPEG and actually writing our decoder in Nim here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYwD7OynFcg

Overall, our concluding opinion is that JPEG has some extremely cool and really smart ideas for how to compress images but the binary file format itself has some very painful things in it (progressive and restart markers as a couple examples).

I am working on OpenStreetMap renderer in Nim - see https://github.com/severak/lunarender3/ (but work somewhat stalled)

I needed some language which is:

- compiled to binaries

- and really fast

- has needed libraries (HTTP server, protocol buffers, sqlite and image generation)

- it's easy to set up

It was nice experience and Nim simply worked for my needs. People on Nim forum were nice and helped me when I ran into problems. It has nice and usable built-in library and I was really impressed by graphic library pixie - https://github.com/treeform/pixie

I would use Nim again when I when I will see this application is suited for it (e.g. some command line apps).

> but not so small that there are no useful libraries written...

Says the person responsible for a ton of really useful, well-done Nim libraries, such as this amazing Cairo/Skia-like library: https://github.com/treeform/pixie#readme

Thank you for all the things you've made for Nim!

A 2d graphics library like Nim’s pixie

RFC: Add large language models to Rust

https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3603

Man, SO and family has really gone downhill. That top answer is absolutely terrible. In fact, if you care, you can literally look at the RFC discussion here to see the actual debate: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/582

Basically, `for x in y` is kind of redundant, already sorta-kinda supported by itertools, and there's also a ton of macros that sorta-kinda do it already. It would just be language bloat at this point.

Literally has nothing to do with memory management.

Congrats!

> Similarly, uv does not yet generate a platform-agnostic lockfile. This matches pip-tools, but differs from Poetry and PDM, making uv a better fit for projects built around the pip and pip-tools workflows.

Do you expect to make the higher level workflow independent of requirements.txt / support a platform-agnostic lockfile? Being attached to Rye makes me think "no".

Without being platform agnostic, to me this is dead-on-arrival and unable to meet the "Cargo for Python" aim.

> uv supports alternate resolution strategies. By default, uv follows the standard Python dependency resolution strategy of preferring the latest compatible version of each package. But by passing --resolution=lowest, library authors can test their packages against the lowest-compatible version of their dependencies. (This is similar to Go's Minimal version selection.)

> uv allows for resolutions against arbitrary target Python versions. While pip and pip-tools always resolve against the currently-installed Python version (generating, e.g., a Python 3.12-compatible resolution when running under Python 3.12), uv accepts a --python-version parameter, enabling you to generate, e.g., Python 3.7-compatible resolutions even when running under newer versions.

This is great to see though!

I can understand it being a flag on these lower level, directly invoked dependency resolution operations.

While you aren't onto the higher level operations yet, I think it'd be useful to see if there is any cross-ecosystem learning we can do for my MSRV RFC: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3537

How are you handling pre-releases in you resolution? Unsure how much of that is specified in PEPs. Its something that Cargo is weak in today but we're slowly improving.

In the early days of Rust there was a debate about whether to support "green threads" and in doing that require runtime support. It was actually implemented and included for a time but it creates problems when trying to do library or embedded code. At the time Go for example chose to go that route, and it was both nice (goroutines are nice to write and well supported) and expensive (effectively requires GC etc). I don't remember the details but there is a Rust RFC from when they removed green threads:

https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/blob/0806be4f282144cfcd55b...

I did some more digging. By RFC 899, I believe Alex Crichton meant PR 899 in this repo:

https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/899

Still, no real discussion of why unbuffered stderr.

Rust has had a stable SIMD vector API[1] for a long time. But, it's architecture specific. The portable API[2] isn't stable yet, but you probably can't use the portable API for some of the more exotic uses of SIMD anyway. Indeed, that's true in .NET's case too[3].

Rust does all this SIMD too. It just isn't in the standard library. But the regex crate does it. Indeed, this is where .NET got its SIMD approach for multiple substring search from in the first place[4]. ;-)

You're right that Rust's standard library is conservatively vectorized though[5]. The main thing blocking this isn't the lack of SIMD availability. It's more about how the standard library is internally structured, and the fact that things like substring search are not actually defined in `std` directly, but rather, in `core`. There are plans to fix this[6].

[1]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/arch/index.html

[2]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/simd/index.html

[3]: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/72fae0073b35a404f03c3...

[4]: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/88394#issuecomment-16...

[5]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/memchr#why-is-the-standard-lib...

[6]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3469