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A couple years ago I gave a talk laying out why I believe we should care about low-level programming. That talk is now available in blog post form as well.
Ben Visness
1,795 posts
Ben Visness
@its_bvisness
My help comes from the Lord.
Lead of the Handmade Network (@handmade_net). WASM engineer at @mozilla. Mentor for @frc2175.
- Distant Horizons has nothing on a single flock of hyperintelligent meeseJust doubled my voxel engine's render distance from 64 to 128, now effortlessly surpassing Minecraft: Bedrock Edition's max of 96. After nearly a year without changes, I finally overhauled the PC renderer, now leaner and faster than ever.
00:00 - Glad to see that university CS education is still deeply confused about the most basic things (this picture is real and comes directly from a former robotics student of mine)
🚨 There’s a large-scale supply chain attack in progress: the NPM account of a reputable developer has been compromised. The affected packages have already been downloaded over 1 billion times, meaning the entire JavaScript ecosystem may be at risk. The malicious payload works- It is distressing how many people in my replies say this is just “an abstraction” or a “simplified explanation”. People actually have no idea how data works, on a fundamental levelGlad to see that university CS education is still deeply confused about the most basic things (this picture is real and comes directly from a former robotics student of mine)
- The write-up of my new graph layout algorithm for SpiderMonkey is now live. We built a custom layout algorithm for JS and WASM that follows the structure of the source code. No more spaghetti nightmares from Graphviz, and thousands of times faster.
00:00 - Casey’s lecture on API design is truly evergreen. The best I’ve ever seen by a mile. The more programming experience I get, the more meaningful this talk becomes. It so sharply clarifies why bad APIs are bad and great APIs are great. youtu.be/ZQ5_u8Lgvyk
- Replying to @FreyaHolmerI love putting a fake CD into my computer, copying the program from my computer to my computer, and then ejecting the fake CD from my computer. This makes sense to me
- Using File Pilot is crazy because every day I get a little bit excited to open a file explorer
00:00 - Our resident wizard rxi just released what may be the world’s simplest JSON parser. 150 lines of C.
- I’m pleased to report that as of today, the Memory64 proposal for WebAssembly is now standard (phase 4)! Finally we will all be able to use 64-bit pointers in WASM apps. This has been a very long time coming (too long!) but I’m very glad to get here.
- I have started to go down the compression rabbit hole. The compressor and decompressor are handwritten WASM. Uncompressed: 52MB Very stupid RLE: 182KB Slightly smarter RLE: 65KB
- My new memory visualizer, hooked up to my old regex builder. Really cool to see both the data layout and the contents of memory updating in real time.
00:00 - I recommend studying the (very short) source code here to understand how simple a parser can be. You would not expect to be able to parse JSON in 150 lines of C, but you can, and rxi actually doesn't do any "tricks" to achieve it. He just knows how to write simple code.Our resident wizard rxi just released what may be the world’s simplest JSON parser. 150 lines of C. github.com/rxi/sj.h
