Recent content on Ivan Molodetskikh’s Webpage
In these turbulent times, one frequently needs to run some tooling in a sandbox. The goal is mainly to reduce the blast radius: make it so programs within the sandbox cannot damage the host system (e.g. delete or overwrite something unintended), but also, to a lesser extent, to hide most of the filesystem to avoid exfiltrating sensitive data. Recently, Bartosz Taudul (of Tracy fame) showed how to…
I’ve been using Fedora Silverblue on my desktop and laptop for the past, what, five years? Silverblue is Fedora’s main atomic variant, a spiritual counterpart to Fedora Workstation. I also make niri , a scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor. In other words, a core system component that you cannot properly test from inside a container or VM—you really want it directly on the host.…
VTE (Virtual TErminal library) is the library underpinning various GNOME terminal emulators. It provides a GTK widget that shows a terminal view, which is used in apps like GNOME Terminal , Console , Black Box , Tilix , Terminator , Ptyxis , and others. It also powers embedded terminals in Builder and Workbench . Over the GNOME 46 cycle, VTE has seen a lot of performance improvements. Christian…
Video of a Half-Life movement map run, recorded with motion blur. Half-Life is an award-winning first-person shooter from 1998. One of the many things setting it apart is a fluid player movement system. You can gradually build up speed in the air by turning left and right, and if you jump as soon as you hit the ground, you keep all of that speed. These techniques, called strafing and…
My university studies and work revolve around image- and video-processing algorithms. I frequently need to compare similar but subtly different output videos: to see how various algorithms solving the same problem behave, or to see the progress as I’m tweaking my own algorithm. In 2020, I made a GNOME app, Identity , to assist me. It plays multiple videos at once in sync, and lets you switch…
Over the summer I worked on implementing the new screenshot UI for GNOME Shell as part of Google Summer of Code 2021 . This post is an overview of the work I did and work still left to do. The project was about adding a dedicated UI to GNOME Shell for taking screenshots and recording screencasts. The idea was to unify related functionality in a discoverable and easy to use interface, while also…
Over the summer I’m working on a new screenshot UI for GNOME Shell. Here’s my progress since the last post . The new “Show Pointer” toggle in the screenshot UI First of all, I made the window selection mode work across multiple screens and ensured that it works correctly with HiDPI and mixed DPI setups. Each screen gets its own Overview-like view of all the windows, letting…
Half-Life is a famous first-person shooter released in 1998. These days Half-Life has a vibrant speedrunning community where players try their best to complete the game as fast as humanly possible. Single-sitting speedruns, when people play through the game from start to finish, are usually streamed and recorded live. But segmented or tool-assisted speedruns—big projects that take weeks or months…
This summer I’m implementing a new screenshot UI for GNOME Shell. In this post I’ll show my progress over the past two weeks. The new screenshot UI in the area selection mode I spent the most time adding the four corner handles that allow you to adjust the selection. GNOME Shell’s drag-and-drop classes were mostly sufficient, save for a few minor things. In particular, I ended up…
Hello! I’m Ivan Molodetskikh, a computer science student from Moscow, Russia. I’ve been involved in GNOME starting from my GSoC 2018 project to port librsvg filters to Rust. Throughout the last year in GNOME I’ve been doing some work to reduce input latency in Mutter, the GNOME’s compositor (by implementing the presentation-time Wayland protocol and adding dynamic render…
Introduction # Throughout the summer I was working on librsvg, a GNOME library for rendering SVG files to Cairo surfaces. This post is an overview of the work I did with relevant links. My Results # For the project I was to port the SVG filter infrastructure of librsvg from C to Rust, adding all missing filter tests from the SVG test suite along the way. I was also expected to implement…
Introduction # I’m working on SVG filter effects in librsvg, a GNOME library for rendering SVG files to Cairo surfaces. After finishing porting all filters from C to Rust and adding tests, I started investigating the filter performance. With the codebase converted to Rust, I am able to confidently apply important optimizations such as parallelization. In this post I’ll show how I…
Introduction # I’m working on librsvg, a GNOME SVG rendering library, to port the SVG filter effects and related infrastructure from C to Rust. Librsvg uses Cairo, a 2D graphics library, for most of its drawing operations. Cairo can draw to a number of different surfaces like XCB and Xlib windows and pixmaps, PDF documents and PostScript files. Image Surfaces # Filter effects operate on…
Introduction # This summer I’m working on librsvg, a GNOME library for rendering SVG files, particularly on porting the SVG filter effects from C to Rust. That involves separating the code for different filters from one huge C file into individual files for each filter, and then porting the filter rendering infrastructure and the individual filters. Thankfully, in the large C file the code…
Hello! # I’m Ivan Molodetskikh, a student of the Moscow State University, and I love Rust. I learned about Rust after a couple of years of mainly programming personal projects in C++ (with a little bit of C#, Java and others here and there). Making my way through writing the first Rust project (what’s a better way to get familiar with a language than trying to make something…