Here’s a sentence I find myself saying several times a week:

…or we could just box it.

There’s two remarkable things about this sentence.

The first, is that the advice is very rarely heeded, and instead, whoever I just said it to disappears for two days, emerging victorious, basking in the knowledge that, YES, the compiler could inline that, if it wanted to.

In Part 11, we spent some time clarifying mechanisms we had previously glossed over: how variables and functions from other ELF objects were accessed at runtime.

We saw that doing so “proper” required the cooperation of the compiler, the assembler, the linker, and the dynamic loader. We also learned that the mechanism for functions was actually quite complicated! And sorta clever!

My watch has a “Noise” app: it shows $\mathrm{d}\mathrm{B}$, for decibels.

My amp has a volume knob, which also shows decibels, although.. negative ones, this time.

And finally, my video editing software has a ton of meters — which are all in decibel or decibel-adjacent units.

Disclaimer:

Trigger warning: depression, talk of suicide.

It’s been a while since I wrote a mental health piece — but I think it’s important to occasionally stop, take a breather, and think about how we feel.

So.

deep breath

I’m okay, I think? Just a little restless.

A bit of personal context

For those keeping score, I went through major life events in 2023 — a divorce, a move, and the news that I might need a second round of jaw surgery.

A few days ago I posted an ooc quine. But while browing HackerNews, I found an even shorter one. The shortest!

Here it is, in its full glory

Can’t see anything? That’s an empty file. It will compile and run just fine. ooc doesn’t require a main function - you can just shove code in there that will run at the program’s initialization. If there’s none, no big deal! It’ll just not run anything.

I’ve been working on the itch.io desktop app for about a year now, so I thought I’d make a quick recap:

At the time of this writing, the app has been downloaded about 460K times (including updates). Not counting the back-end, the app and its various components are made up of around 100K lines of code (mostly javascript and golang), most of which is open-source.

Time for another Advent of Code 2020 problem!

That one sounds like it’s going to be fun. Our input is pretty much assembly, like this:

nop +0 acc +1 jmp +4 acc +3 jmp -3 acc -99 acc +1 jmp -4 acc +6

So, the first thing we’re going to do is write down some types.

There’s more than one way to approach this problem, but let’s go with this:

#[derive =

Being creative is hard work, let’s go optimizing instead! My graphics engine dye was pretty naive about displaying text, and it was wasteful. Let’s see how I made it all better with this one weird tip.

Disclaimer: Even after a few years I’m still very much an OpenGL newbie. Please don’t hit me with crowbars.

Once upon a time, OpenGL was easy to use - and also falling out of relevancy as far as high-performance 3D graphics were concerned. But it wasn’t all bad! You could basically pick up any library out there and integrate it with your existing GL project. Not that it’s a good idea, but it usually just worked.

Today I decided to release sam 0.2.0. There are only a handful of new features in there but it’s still releaseworthy! See the previous sam announcement for more information on the tool itself.

Source path and lib folders

Let’s take a look at what sam tells us when launching it.

sam version 0.2.0 Usage: sam [update|get|status|promote] Commands * update: update sam's grimoir of formulas * get [USEFILE]: clone and/or pull all dependencies * status [USEFILE]: display short git status of all dependencies * promote [USEFILE]: replace read-only github url with a read-write one for given use file * clone [--no-deps] [REPONAME]: clone a repository by its formula name Note: All USEFILE arguments are optional. By default, the first .use file of the current directory is used Copyleft 2013 Amos Wenger aka @nddrylliog