This article is dedicated to discussing why it's so hard to detect the 'key up' or 'key release' event in a Linux terminal environment without relying on X server. Several techniques and code examples will be shown that are capable of detecting the keyup event on Linux (with and without an X server), but all…
There is a popular movement on Choosing Boring Technology started by article by Dan McKinley, followed by some discussions on Hacker News…
“Don’t write clever code.” Why not? “Because it’s hard to understand.” People who say this think of clever code such as Duff’s Device: Duff's Device send(to, from, count) registershort*to, *from; registercount; { registern =(count +7) /8; switch(count %8) { case0: do{ *to =*from++; case7: *to =*from++; case6: *to…
It's now roughly seven or eight years that I'm building dynamic front ends for the web. From digital art wallets to games (1, 2) and synthesizers, I've seen it all. And since my process
Git ls-files is up to 5 times faster than fd or find in this benchmark, but why?
personal web-log
Summary: JWCC is a minimal extension to the widely used JSON file format with (1) optional commas after the final element of arrays and objects and (2) C/C++ style comments. These two features make it more suitable for human-editable configuration files, without adding so many features that it’s incompatible with…
The maintainer of glibc, Ulrich Drepper, wrote an article called "Static Linking Considered Harmful". This is why his post is wrong.
I’m inspired to write this post because Someone Is Wrong On The Internet. Of course a more accurate statement would be “I disagree with some aspects of what someone on the internet said, even though they have an entirely valid point of view”. But that’s less catchy. I saw a Tweet I violently agreed with, so I…
How to understand the language of <\/?[\w\s]*>|<.+[\W]>
This week twenty-five years ago, Quake broke new ground in game engine realism. It was one of the first commercial games to have fully texture mapped 3D scenes rendered in real-time, with pre-computed lightmaps adding an extra layer of atmosphere.
In this series, we will explore how to write a compiler for a small subset of C to LLVM in Haskell. Our language, Micro C, is basically a small subset of real C. We'll have basic numeric types, a real bool type, pointers, and structs. At the end of the series, we'll have a beautiful executable, mcc (Micro C…
Today you are frustrated.
Yesterday I found myself googling how to do something that I’d think it was pretty standard: How to download multiple files from AWS S3 in parallel using Python? After not finding anything reliable in Stack Overflow, I went to the Boto3 documentation and started coding. Something I thought it would take me like 15…
We wrote a Brainfuck compiler back in April . That one developed a simple architecture to support multiple backends. Today, I want to write a new Brainfuck compiler. One that can only run on a single system, OpenBSD /amd64. And one that is as small as I can possibly make it. I broke into the sub-256 bytes club with my…
Welcome! This is a series of blog posts that shows you how to build a text editor in Rust.
Problem: Show that all horses are of the same color. “Solution”: We will show, by induction, that for any set of $ n$ horses, every horse in that set has the same color. Suppose $ n=1$, this is obviously true. Now suppose for all sets of $ n$ horses, every horse in the set has the same color. Consider any set $ H$ of…
Asynchronous Rust is powerful but has a reputation for being hard to learn. There have been various ideas on how to fix the trickiest aspects, though with my focus being on Tokio 1.0, I had not been able to dedicate much focus to those topics. However, Niko’s async vision effort has recently started the discussion…
In 2020, I started writing a 3D game engine from scratch in C++. This is a post about how I added skeletal animation to it. Drake is in it, so buckle up.
These are the notes for a talk I gave at RubyKaigi 2021, which is why they’re written as if we were talking and going through some slides and code together.
Go 1.18 will be a significant release of the programming language that will contain some major features that I’m excited about. The upcoming version is scheduled for early 2022. The first beta should be out in a month. Let’s take a look at some of the new features that will be available.
David Fowler doesn't have a blog. I think the psychic weight of having a blog ...
I spent a lot of time and effort digging up the numbers and facts for this post! Lots of people keep referring to the awesome summary put together by a friendly pseudonymous "Tim" which says that "53 out of 95" (55.7%) security flaws in curl could've been prevented if curl had been written in Rust. … Continue reading…
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
Back in May 27, 2020 Microsoft published a blog post describing a new feature in Notepad:
