Alain Galvan 🌞 @alain@octodon.social

Been working on a really awesome #cpp library for creating cross platform apps using any windowing protocol you want (Win32, UWP, Cocoa, UIKit, XCB, XLib, Mir, Wayland, WebAssembly) for quickly getting apps off the ground:

https://github.com/alaingalvan/CrossWindow

Still a WIP but it's coming along really well, with sister libraries to help create apps using any graphics API, and cross window, cross graphics API demos working. <3

#GDC was insane! Good to be back. All sorts of talks on Vulkan, HDR, Real-Time Raytracing, roundtable discussions about VFX, sound programming, etc. :D

So writing a parser isn't too tough, using a library called Bison to parse #shader languages in an attempt to make a transpiler designed similarly to libraries like PostCSS.

https://github.com/alaingalvan/sparklers

It's a WIP but we'll see where this goes. :3

@kingu_platypus_gidora Hey, 10 years isn't that far off, that should be enough time for them, right? :P

In the meantime I guess I'm stuck with overpriced Apple computers when it comes to C++.

I love Visual Studio as much as the next guy for #cpp but when it comes to errors and warnings XCode has it beat.

Hopefully Microsoft will get the ball rolling with Visual Studio 2018 along with C++ modules. :D

https://alain.xyz/blog/a-review-of-shader-languages

Here's a blog post I wrote about shader languages and their differences. ;)

@daggertooth Yeah it sucks. :(

Makes it way harder to communicate the idea, but eh. For Marmoset Hexels I whipped up a post-processing effect to allow users to set the bitrate of their images, useful for commodore 64 / game boy color conformant art. 🙌

artstation.com/artwork/a0lGq

#pixelart of Dark Souls 2 and 3 on my Artstation above: 👆

https://octodon.social/media/WGo937kxZt7zz045s94

Getting back to #pixelart.

Marmoset Hexel's is adding a ton of useful pixel art tools guys! <3 https://octodon.social/media/PN1CjSXw-uLY8Sjaiyg

So it turns out the Metal shader compiler has a for loop unrolling problem. Interesting how it differs from HLSL's compiler that way...

This week I've been reading Understanding Compression, an O'Reilly book about data compression. After looking at companies like https://binomial.info doing it and Google summer of code cases where PhD students improved download speeds for Google Play, it got really interesting.

How often do you think about compression, it could help your app out one way or another. ;)

https://octodon.social/media/wCH_PQgZmyuA04FwVzA

@luke_nukem A basic sales model, just placing orders and people can buy devices, and customize their orders through a React frontend. Users can pay us to maintain the device or do it themselves.

Using Braintree as a payments system, React for clientside rendering (I might add serverside to that with a node server in addition to the Rust API server). TypeScript as the main frontend language (I use it on https://alain.xyz, way better than babel/js imho).

@luke_nukem Recently my family bought a Nest security camera, which is basically just a backend with some facial recognition, and a mic/camera. Seems like a waste to pay x dollars a month to pay nest to maintain a closed source device when a dev can hook up open source tech to Amazon S3 for pennies.

Then there was the loonie idea of the Juicero Press, 120 Million dollars raised for a juice pressing device that's way too expensive and useless.

@luke_nukem An IOT business. There's a lot of venture capitalists interested in the IOT market, however products developed in this space suffer from the John Deer Effect: the idea that you don't own the product you paid for, you're licensing it. So the idea is to sell IOT devices, but they're open source and you can maintain them yourself or take them apart according to your needs.

@luke_nukem https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/

Check out some of the JSON benchmarks to get a good idea of where things are standing. ;)

@luke_nukem According to TechEmpower's Web Framework benchmarks, Rust is the lowest latency, but oddly enough performs around Node.js' level in throughput.

Used rust for 3 servers, one on my personal site for continuous integration, one for a standing desk, and now another for the backend of a business I thought up. https://rocket.rs was the best HTTP library out of the others I tried (Nickel, Iron). :D

Add on top of that Rust's first class unit testing, doc generation with markdown, and best of all: focus on safety and you've got a really stable server. :)

Been working on a web backend with #rust and Rocket.

Normally a Node.js + Express server has a 33 ms local latency and uses 660 mb of ram, so it was a really pleasant surprise to see the Rocket use only 2 mb of ram and have a 22 ms local latency.