A gathering of development thoughts of Jussi Pakkanen. Some of you may know him as the creator of the Meson build system. jpakkane at gmail dot com
In our previous post we looked at fixing a super 8 film projector. While watching film with a real projector has its own charm, it is inconvenient to say the least. First of all you make the entire room properly dark or you can't see anything. This is regardless of the fact that the projector bulb is consuming 100 watts of power to show the image. Even if you manage not to burn the film, merely…
Warning! Do not try any of this at home! Messing with internals of electrical devices is dangerous and can lead to fires, serious injury and even loss of life. My dad started using a super 8 film camera as early as 1967 (the system was launched in 1965). He stopped doing it in the 1980s as it became pretty much impossible to buy film. Ever since then the films have been stored in multiple…
I submitted talk proposals about Pystd, the from-scratch written standard library for C++ (custom design, not a implementation of the ISO specification) to a bunch of conferences. Unfortunately all of them were rejected, so it's blog posting time. A controversial opinion Pretty much everybody agrees that compiling C++ is slow, but I personally feel that it is intolerably slow . Other people might…
Almost exactly three years ago the Oceangate submarine implosion happened . The disaster came about when a billionaire called Stockton Rush created his own unclassified submarine to go sightseeing on the Titanic. Ignoring all advice from experts he created a "macgyveresque death trap" that eventually killed him and sadly also 4 innocent people. The whole thing was a massive display of stupidity…
One of the many nice language features in Python are keyword arguments. They make some types of APIs concise and readable. Like so: Unfortunately C does not have keyword arguments and, by extension, neither does C++. Adding them as a language feature would take 15-20 years of effort, most of which would consist of trying to convince people via email that such a feature is important and should be…
In the past I have written many blog posts on implementing various PDF features in CapyPDF . Typically they explain the feature being implemented, how confusing the documentation is, what perverse undocumented quirks one has to work around to get things working and so on. To save the effort of me writing and you reading yet another post of the same type, let me just say that you can now use…
In our previous episode we wrote a merge sort implementation that runs a bit faster than the one in stdlibc++. The question then becomes, could it be made even faster. If you go through the relevant literature one potential improvement is to do a multiway merge. That is, instead of merging two arrays into one, you merge four into one using, for example, a priority queue. This seems like a slam…
In an earlier blog post we found out that Pystd's simple sorting algorithm implementations were 5-10% slower than their stdlibc++ counterparts. The obvious follow up nerd snipe is to ask "can we make the Pystd implementation faster than stdlibc++?" For all tests below the data set used was 10 million consecutive 64 bit integers shuffled in a random order. The order was the same for all algorithms.…
At this point in history, AI sociopaths have purchased all the world's RAM in order to run their copyright infringement factories at full blast. Thus the amount of memory in consumer computers and phones seems to be going down. After decades of not having to care about memory usage, reducing it has very much become a thing. Relevant questions to this state of things include a) is it really worth…
One of the most optimized algorithms in any standard library is sorting. It is used everywhere so it must be fast. Thousands upon thousands of developer hours have been sunk into inventing new algorithms and making sort implementations faster. Pystd has a different design philosophy where fast compilation times and readability of the implementation have higher priority than absolute performance.…
There are a lot of prime classes, such as left truncating primes, twin primes, mersenne primes, palindromic primes, emirp primes and so on. The Wikipedia page on primes lists many more. Recently I got to thinking (as one is wont to do) how difficult would it be to come up with a brand new one. The only reliable way to know is to try it yourself. The basic loop The method I used was fairly…
Pystd is an experiment on what a C++ standard library without any backwards compatibility requirements would look like. Its design goals are in order of decreasing priority: Fast build times Simplicity of implementation Good performance It also has some design-antigoals: Not compatible with the ISO C++ standard library No support for weird corner cases like linked lists or types that can't be…
Bill Hoffman, the original creator of the CMake language held a presentation at CppCon . At approximately 49 minutes in he starts talking about future plans for dependency management. He says, and I now quote him directly, that "in this future I envision", one should be able to do something like the following (paraphrasing). Your project has dependencies A, B and C. Typically you get them from…
I, too, have (or as you can probably guess from the title of this post, had) a Facebook account. I only ever used it for two purposes. Finding out what friends I rarely see are doing Getting invites to events Facebook has over the years made usage #1 pretty much impossible. My feed contains approximately 1% posts by my friends and 99% ads for image meme "humor" groups whose expected amusement…
If you ask people why they are using AI (or want other people to use it) you get a ton of different answers. Typically none of them contain the real reason, which is that using AI is dirt cheap. Between paying a fair amount to get something done and paying very little to give off an impression that the work has been done, the latter tends to win. The reason AI is so cheap is that it is being paid…
Chapterizer (not a great name, I know) is a tool I wrote to generate books. Originally used Cairo and Pango to generate PDF files. It works and was fairly easy to get started but has its own set of downsides: Cairo always produces RGB PDFs, which are not accepted by printing houses Cairo does not handle advanced PDF features like trim boxes Pango aligns text at the top of each line, but for high…
One of the core design points of Pystd has been that it maintains perfect API and ABI stability while also making it possible to improve the code in arbitrary ways. To see how that can be achieved, let's look at what creating a new "year epoch" looks like. It's quite simple. First you run this script Then you add the new files to Meson build targets (I was too lazy to implement that in the…
Note: this post represents my personal opinions as a Debian maintainer of a single package (Meson). It is not my intention to throw anyone involved in the service under a bus, but some things about it are not good and need to be spoken aloud (in my opinion anyway, other people may disagree and that is fine). There was a post called Configuring a mail transfert [sic] agent to interact with the…
Truly, we are living in a new Golden Age for all those sharing our passion in subjugating all of human race under a single iron fist. And to think that mere few decades ago we thought that our way of life was heading to the dung heap of humanity. Education, international cooperation and other such scourges of democracy and civilization seemed to have taken an unescapable stranglehold on our core…
PDF can do a lot of things. One them is embedding 3D models in the file and displaying them. The user can orient them freely in 3D space and even choose how they should be rendered (wireframe, solid, etc). The main use case for this is engineering applications . Supporting 3D annotations is, as expected, unexpectedly difficult because: No open source PDF viewer seems to support 3D models. Even…
PDF/A is a specific version of PDF designed for long term archival of electronic data. The idea being that PDF/A files are both self contained and fully specified, so they can be opened in the future without any loss of fidelity. Implementing PDF/A export is complicated by the fact that the specification is an ISO standard, which is not publicly available. Fortunately, there are PDF/A validators…
I have just released CapyPDF 1.8. It's mostly minor fixes and tweaks but there are two notable things. The first one is that CapyPDF now supports variable axis fonts. The other one is that CapyPDF will now produce PDF version 2.0 files instead of 1.7 by default. This might seem like a big leap but really isn't. PDF 2.0 is pretty much the same as 1.7, just with documentation updates and deprecating…
Building code for Android with Meson has long been possible, but a bit hacky and not particularly well documented. Recently some new features have landed in Meson main, which make the experience quite a bit nicer. To demonstrate, I have updated the Platypus sample project to build and run on Android. The project itself aims demonstrate how you'd build a GUI application with shared native code on…
Writing out C++ module files and importing them is awfully complicated. The main cause for this complexity is that the C++ standard can not give requirements like "do not engage in Vogon-level stupidity, as that is not supported". As a result implementations have to support anything and everything under the sun. For module integration there are multiple different approaches ranging from custom…
Since C++ compilers are starting to support import std , I ran a few experiments to see what the status of that is. GCC 15 on latest Ubuntu was used for all of the following. The goal One of the main goals of a working module implementation is to be able to support the following workflow: Suppose we have an executable E It uses a library L L and E are made by different people and have different…