Putting thoughts in bits

I think about lots of things but when it comes down to writing them, drawing them, implementing them, it’s not that easy. Even with years of practice in each of these trades, it’s still an uphill battle.

Which is why I am not going to read that article after I wrote it and will go straight to publication.

Not assuming nobody cares

Addressing the rumors

There have been rumors going around, in the Reddit thread for facet, my take on reflection in Rust, which happened a bit too early, but here we are, cat’s out of the bag, let’s talk about it!

Rumors that I, podcaster/youtuber fasterthanlime, want to kill serde, serialization / deserialization framework loved by many and which contributed greatly to Rust’s success, and I just wanted to address those rumors and say that…

Despite their peaceful appearance, game developers actually lead thrilling lives! Here are three things I learned (or re-learned) about yesterday that I’d like to share with you, in the form of assumptions that revealed false.

VSync is relatively straightforward. Right?

As an obsessive-compulsive, bipolar, perfectionist game dev, getting your game to run smoothly on all kinds of operating systems, graphics cards, and drivers combination is something of a holy grail. Many look for it, but let’s be honest here, it never really turns out as expected.

Falling out of love with warp

Back when I wrote this codebase, warp was the best / only alternative for something relatively high-level on top of hyper.

I was never super fond of warp’s model — it’s a fine crate, just not for me.

The way routing works is essentially building a type that gets larger and larger. One route might look like:

 bye = warp warppath | | name

In the previous chapter, we’ve written a Dockerfile to build the catscii service inside Docker. The result is a container image that can be pushed to production!

Hey internet! So, someone broke into some of my accounts.

I’m taking entire responsibility for this - there’s the part where I fucked up, and if I didn’t fuck up, then none of this would’ve happened.

But there’s also the part where a series of design decisions from various vendors combined into the perfect storm for me.

And we’re going to talk about both! Separately! And calmly.

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.

In our last article, we managed to load and execute a PIE (position-independent executable) compiled from the following code:

; in `samples/hello-pie.asm` global _start section .text _start: mov rdi, 1 ; stdout fd lea rsi, [rel msg] mov rdx, 9 ; 8 chars + newline mov rax, 1 ; write syscall , , "hi there", 10

Time for the Day 12 problem!

In this problem, we have a ship. And we have navigation instructions:

• Action N means to move north by the given value.
• Action S means to move south by the given value.
• Action E means to move east by the given value.
• Action W means to move west by the given value.
• Action L means to turn left the given number of degrees.
• Action R means to turn right the given number of degrees.

Let’s set aside our sup project for a while.

Don’t get me wrong - it’s a perfectly fine project, and, were we simply rewriting “ping” for Windows in Rust, we could (almost) stop there.

We’re currently using the operating system’s facility to speak ICMP, which is great for a bunch of reasons: we can be sure that whatever flaws there are in the implementation, all “native” Windows programs suffer from it as well.