The Performance Impact Of C++’s `final` Keyword For Optimization

April 24, 2024 by Maya Posch 21 Comments

In the world of software development the term ‘optimization’ is generally reason for experienced developers to start feeling decidedly nervous, especially when a feature is marked as an ‘easy and free optimization’. The final keyword introduced in C++11 is one of such features. It promises a way to speed up object-oriented code by omitting the vtable call indirection by marking a class or member function as – unsurprisingly – final, meaning that it cannot be inherited from or overridden. Inspired by this promise, [Benjamin Summerton] figured that he’d run a range of benchmarks to see what performance uplift he’d get on his ray tracing project.

To be as thorough as possible, the tests were run on three different systems, including 64-bit Intel and AMD systems, as well as on Apple Silicon (M1). For the compilers various versions of GCC (12.x, 13.x), as well as Clang (15, 17) and MSVC (17) were employed, with rather interesting results for final versus no final tests. Clang was probably the biggest surprise, as with the keyword added, performance with Clang-generated code absolutely tanked. MSVC was a mixed bag, as were the GCC versions other than GCC 13.2 on AMD Ryzen, which saw a bump of a few percent faster.

Ultimately, it seems that there’s no free lunch as usual, and adding final to your code falls distinctly under ‘only use it if you know what you’re doing’. As things stand, the resulting behavior seems wildly inconsistent.

FLOSS Weekly Episode 780: Zoneminder — Better Call Randal

April 23, 2024 by Jonathan Bennett 3 Comments

This week Jonathan Bennett and Aaron Newcomb chat with Isaac Connor about Zoneminder! That’s the project that’s working to store and deliver all the bits from security cameras — but the CCTV world has changed a lot since Zoneminder first started, over 20 years ago. The project is working hard to keep up, with machine learning object detection, WebRTC, and more. Isaac talks a bit about developer burnout, and a case or two over the years where an aggressive contributor seems suspicious in retrospect. And when is the next stable version of Zoneminder coming out, anyway?

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Programming Ada: First Steps On The Desktop

April 23, 2024 by Maya Posch 51 Comments

Who doesn’t want to use a programming language that is designed to be reliable, straightforward to learn and also happens to be certified for everything from avionics to rockets and ICBMs? Despite Ada’s strong roots and impressive legacy, it has the reputation among the average hobbyist of being ‘complicated’ and ‘obscure’, yet this couldn’t be further from the truth, as previously explained. In fact, anyone who has some or even no programming experience can learn Ada, as the very premise of Ada is that it removes complexity and ambiguity from programming.

In this first part of a series, we will be looking at getting up and running with a basic desktop development environment on Windows and Linux, and run through some Ada code that gets one familiarized with the syntax and basic principles of the Ada syntax. As for the used Ada version, we will be targeting Ada 2012, as the newer Ada 2022 standard was only just approved in 2023 and doesn’t change anything significant for our purposes.

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Compiling And Running Turbo Pascal In The Browser

April 17, 2024 by Maya Posch 15 Comments

When a friend of [Lawrence Kesteloot] found a stack of 3.5″ floppy disks, they found that it contained Turbo Pascal code which the two of them had worked on back in the Summer of 1989. Amidst reminiscing about the High School days and watching movies on VHS, [Lawrence] sought a way to bring these graphical applications once more back to life. Not finding an easy way to compile Turbo Pascal code on Mac even back in 2013 when he started the project, he ended up writing a Turbo Pascal compiler in JavaScript, as any reasonable person would do in this situation.

SPIDER.PAS in its full glory. (Credit: Lawrence Kesteloot)

As noted by [Lawrence], the compiler doesn’t implement the full Turbo Pascal 5.5 language, but only the subset that was required to compile and run these applications which they had found on the floppy disks. These include ROSE.PAS and SPIDER.PAS along with three others, and can also be found in the GitHub repository. As can be seen in the online version of the compiler, it captures the feel of programming Pascal in 1989 on the command line.

Naturally, the software situation has changed somewhat over the last decade. We’ve recently seen some promising multi-platform Pascal compilers, and of course you could even run Turbo Pascal in DOSBox or similar. That might make this project seem irrelevant, but being able to write and run Pascal applications in more ways and on more platforms is never a bad thing.

Porting Modern Windows Applications To Windows 95

April 14, 2024 by Maya Posch 79 Comments

Windows 95 was an amazing operating system that would forever transform the world of home computing, setting the standard for user interaction on a desktop and quite possibly was the OS which had the longest queue of people lining up on launch day to snag a boxed copy. This raises the question of why we still don’t write software for this amazing OS, because ignoring the minor quibbles of ‘security patches’ and ‘modern hardware compatibility’, it’s still has pretty much the same Win32 API as supported in Windows 11, plus it doesn’t even spy on you, or show you ads. This line of reasoning led [MattKC] recently to look at easy ways to port modern applications to Windows 95.

In the video, the available options are ticked off, starting with straight Win32 API. Of course, nobody writes for the Win32 API for fun or to improve their mental well-being, and frameworks like WxWidgets and ~~Qute~~Qt have dropped support for Windows 9x and generally anything pre-Win2k for years now. The easiest option therefore might be Microsoft’s .NET framework, which in its (still supported) 2.0 iteration actually supports Windows 98 SE, or basically within spitting distance of running it on the original Win95.

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Dump A Code Repository As A Text File, For Easier Sharing With Chatbots

April 14, 2024 by Donald Papp 16 Comments

Some LLMs (Large Language Models) can act as useful programming assistants when provided with a project’s source code, but experimenting with this can get a little tricky if the chatbot has no way to download from the internet. In such cases, the code must be provided by either pasting it into the prompt or uploading a file manually. That’s acceptable for simple things, but for more complex projects, it gets awkward quickly.

To make this easier, [Eric Hartford] created github2file, a Python script that outputs a single text file containing the combined source code of a specified repository. This text file can be uploaded (or its contents pasted into the prompt) making it much easier to share code with chatbots.

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Git Good, By Playing A Gamified Version Of Git

April 12, 2024 by Donald Papp 4 Comments

What better way to learn to use Git than a gamified interface that visualizes every change? That’s the idea behind Oh My Git! which aims to teach players all about the popular version control system that underpins so many modern software projects.

Git good, with a gameified git interface.

Sometimes the downside to a tool being so ubiquitous is that it tends to be taken for granted that everyone already knows how to use it, and those starting entirely from scratch can be left unsure where to begin. That’s what creators [bleeptrack] and [blinry] had in mind with Oh My Git! which is freely available for Linux, Windows, and macOS.

The idea is to use a fun playing-card interface to not only teach players the different features, but also to build intuitive familiarity for operations like merging and rebasing by visualizing in real-time the changes a player’s actions make.

The game is made with beginners in mind, with the first two (short) levels establishing that managing multiple versions of a file can quickly become unwieldy without help. Enter git — which the game explains is essentially a time machine — and it’s off to the races.

It might be aimed at beginners, but more advanced users can learn a helpful trick or two. The game isn’t some weird pseudo-git simulator, either. The back end uses real git repositories, with a real shell and git interface behind it all. Prefer to type commands in directly instead of using the playing card interface? Go right ahead!

Oh My Git! uses the free and open-source Godot game engine (not to be confused with the Godot machine, a chaos-based random number generator.)