winchrome VS stb

Hey, Congratulations on your upgrade to Windows 7!

Not 48 hours ago, I spoke highly of the benefits of Windows 7[1], as a user myself.

It is absolutely possible to use Windows 7 reasonably securely, if you take the appropriate precautions(again, see my comment)

> I can use the latest versions of Google Chrome

Firefox? Yes. Chrome? No.

Chromium 109 is the last version to support Windows 7. Here's the last working ungoogled variant [2].

Switch to LibreWolf[3] Firefox based browser with user.js modifications[3] pre-installed. Or if you don't trust librewolf, use Firefox and manually add the same user.js[4]

It's better for security than Chrome could ever hope to be.

Your web browser's javascript continue to be the predominant way for malware to make its entry. So just make sure to take the appropriate security precautions, as mentioned in my comment [1].

> When Firefox stopped receiving upgrades I switched to Mypal browser, an open source browser specially made for Windows XP. It is cruder than Google Chrome but does the job most of the time.

Have you tried K-Meleon on Windows XP[5]? It's Old Firefox(pre-Australis) based, and still gets updates.

Windows 7 is the last legit good Microsoft Operating System.

It truly is a wonder and a delight to use and modify.

Anyway, all the very best on your Windows 7 journey. May it serve you well.

Cheers!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35431587

[2] https://github.com/macchrome/winchrome/releases/tag/v109.541...

[3] https://librewolf.net/installation/windows/

[4] https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/blob/master/user.js

[5] https://kmeleonbrowser.org

v109.0.5414.120-r1070088 (Ungoogled, 25 Jan 2023) Marmaduke • up-to-date • ungoogled • widevine • all-codecs+ • win64 • Portable • Archive • Installer

I use vivaldi and this: https://github.com/macchrome/winchrome/releases

What is this? https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium-windows Is this versions not at chromium.woolyss.com? It's not the Marmaduke version, which is at https://github.com/macchrome/winchrome Is that the version the Marmaduke build is based on (with some added features)?

Ungoogled Chromium Binaries: https://github.com/macchrome/winchrome/releases, or https://chromium.woolyss.com/

I have been directly affected by it. It turns out the binaries distributed via winget on windows come from an apparently reliable source (https://github.com/macchrome/winchrome/releases) that has even changed some browser features. I found it out when I saw a button saying 'black' instead of 'back' on a 'confirm form resubmission' dialog box. I dug deeper and reproduced it with the help of a UG dev.

I'm using Windows version, but there's also Linux version in another repo. https://github.com/macchrome/winchrome/releases/tag/v102.0.5005.63-6-r992738-Win64

Consider ungoogled chromium as an alternative (it still has the win11 style menu flag!): https://github.com/macchrome/winchrome/releases

here https://github.com/macchrome/winchrome/releases are the very latest versions of ungoogled chromium binaries(94.0.4606.81). You can even see the source code to verify yourself.

Have you considered not using an engine at all, in favor of libraries? There are many amazing libraries I've used for game development - all in C/C++ - that you can piece together:

* General: [stb](https://github.com/nothings/stb)

Great to see more accessible references on font internals. I have dabbled on this a bit last year and managed to have a parser and render the points of a glyph's contour (I stopped before Bezier and shape filling stuff). I still have not considered hinting, so it's nice that it's covered. What helped me was an article from the Handmade Network [1] and the source of stb_truetype [2] (also used in Dear ImGUI).

[1] https://handmade.network/forums/articles/t/7330-implementing....

[2] https://github.com/nothings/stb/blob/master/stb_truetype.h

So I read through the materials on mesh shaders and work graphs and looked at sample code. These won't really work (see below). As I implied previously, it's best to research/discuss these sort of matters with professional graphics programmers who have experience actually using the technologies under consideration.

So for the sake of future web searchers who discover this thread: there are only two proven ways to efficiently draw thousands of unique textures of different sizes with a single draw call that are actually used by experienced graphics programmers in production code as of 2023.

Proven method #1: Pack these thousands of textures into a texture atlas.

Proven method #2: Use bindless resources, which is still fairly bleeding edge, and will require fallback to atlases if targeting the PC instead of only high end console (Xbox Series S|X...).

Mesh shaders by themselves won't work: These have similar texture access limitations to the old geometry/tessellation stage they improve upon. A limited, fixed number of textures still must be bound before each draw call (say, 16 or 32 textures, not 1000s), unless bindless resources are used. So mesh shaders must be used with an atlas or with bindless resources.

Work graphs by themselves won't work: This feature is bleeding edge shader model 6.8 whereas bindless resources are SM 6.6. (Xbox Series X|S might top out at SM 6.7, I can't find an authoritative answer.) It looks like work graphs might only work well on nVidia GPUs and won't work well on Intel GPUs anytime soon (but, again, I'm not knowledgeable enough to say this authoritatively). Furthermore, this feature may have a hard dependency on using bindless to begin with. That is, I can't tell if one is allowed to execute a work graph that binds and unbinds individual texture resources. And if one could do such a thing, it would certainly be slower than using bindless. The cost of bindless is paid "up front" when the textures are uploaded.

Some programmers use Texture2DArray/GL_TEXTURE_2D_ARRAY as an alternative to atlases but two limitations are (1) the max array length (e.g. GL_MAX_ARRAY_TEXTURE_LAYERS) might only be 256 (e.g. for OpenGL 3.0), (2) all textures must be the same size.

Finally, for the sake of any web searcher who lands on this thread in the years to come, to pack an atlas well a good packing algorithm is needed. It's harder to pack triangles than rectangles but triangles use atlas memory more efficiently and a good triangle packing will outperform the fancy new bindless rendering. Some open source starting points for packing:

https://github.com/nothings/stb/blob/master/stb_rect_pack.h

https://github.com/ands/trianglepacker

The STB headers are mostly built like that: https://github.com/nothings/stb

You could also add an optional 'convenience API' over the lower-level flexible-but-inconvenient core API, as long as core library can be compiled on its own.

In essence it's just a way to decouple the actually important library code from runtime environment details which might be better implemented outside the C/C++ stdlib.

It's already as simple as the stdlib IO functions not being asynchrononous while many operating systems provide more modern alternatives. For a specific type of library (such an image decoder) it's often better to delegate such details to the library user instead of circumventing the stdlib and talking directly to OS APIs.

My stuff for instance:

https://github.com/floooh/sokol

...inspired by:

https://github.com/nothings/stb

But it's not so much about the build system, but requiring a separate C/C++ compiler toolchain (Rust needs this, Zig currently does not - unless the proposal is implemented).

STB Libraries: https://github.com/nothings/stb

stb_ds is also very popular.