Blog of Raph Levien.
The GPU in your computer is about 10 to 100 times more powerful than the CPU, depending on workload. For real-time graphics rendering and machine learning, you are enjoying that power, and doing those workloads on a CPU is not viable. Why aren’t we exploiting that power for other workloads? What prevents a GPU from being a more general purpose computer?
At WWDC, Apple introduced Metal shader converter, a tool for converting shaders from DXIL (the main compilation target of HLSL in DirectX12) to Metal. While it is no doubt useful for reducing the cost of porting games from DirectX to Metal, I feel it does not move us any closer to a world of robust GPU infrastructure, and in many ways just adds more underspecified layers of complexity.
Finding the optimal Bézier path to fit some source curve is, surprisingly, not yet a completely solved problem. Previous posts have given good solutions for specific instances: Fitting cubic Bézier curves primarily addressed Euler spirals (which are very smooth), while Parallel curves of cubic Béziers rendered parallel curves. In this post, I describe refinements of the ideas to solve the much…
Note to readers: this is an April Fools post, intended to satirize bad arguments made against Rust. I have mixed feelings about it now, as I think people who understood the context appreciated the humor, but some people were confused. That’s partly because it’s written in a very persuasive style, and I mixed in some good points. For a good discussion of C++ safety in particular, see JF Bastien’s…
Vello is a new GPU accelerated renderer for 2D graphics that relies heavily on compute shaders for its operation. (It was formerly known as piet-gpu, but we renamed it recently because it is no longer based on the [Piet] render context abstraction, and has been substantially rewritten). As such, it depends heavily on having good infrastructure for writing and running compute shaders, consistent…
This post reflects a bit on 2022 and contains wishes for 2023. It mixes project and technical stuff, which I write about fairly frequently, and more personal reflections, which I don’t.
There’s a lot of new interest in open source text layout projects, including cosmic-text, and the parley work being done by Chad Brokaw. I’m hopeful we’ll get a good Rust solution soon.
Distance Accuracy Method The problem of parallel or offset curves has remained challenging for a long time. Parallel curves have applications in 2D graphics (for drawing strokes and also adding weight to fonts), and also robotic path planning and manufacturing, among others. The exact offset curve of a cubic Bézier can be described (it is an analytic curve of degree 10) but it not tractable to…
A few times a week, someone asks on the #gui-and-ui channel on the Rust Discord, “what is the best UI toolkit for my application?” Unfortunately there is still no clear answer to this question. Generally the top contenders are egui, Iced, and Druid, with Slint looking promising as well, but web-based approaches such as Tauri are also gaining some momentum, and of course there’s always the…
Rust is an appealing language for building user interfaces for a variety of reasons, especially the promise of delivering both performance and safety. However, finding a good architecture is challenging. Architectures that work well in other languages generally don’t adapt well to Rust, mostly because they rely on shared mutable state and that is not idiomatic Rust, to put it mildly. It is…