Requiem for piet-gpu-hal

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...

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...

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...

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.