Programming and Open Hardware
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppSimdJson 0.1.9 on CRAN: New Upstream
RcppSimdJson wraps the fantastic and genuinely impressive simdjson library by Daniel Lemire and collaborators. Via very clever algorithmic engineering to obtain largely branch-free code, coupled with modern C++ and newer compiler instructions, it results in parsing gigabytes of JSON parsed per second which is quite mindboggling. The best-case performance is ‘faster than CPU speed’ as use of parallel SIMD instructions and careful branch avoidance can lead to less than one cpu cycle per byte parsed; see the video of the talk by Daniel Lemire at QCon.
This release updates the underlying simdjson library to version 3.0.1, settles on C++17 as the language standard, exports a worker function for direct C(++) access, and polishes a few small things around the package and tests.
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C++ programming language and safety: Here's where it goes next | ZDNET
There's been a shift towards 'memory safe' languages. So, can updates to C++ help it catch up in the eyes of developers?
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Tagebuch eines Interplanetaren Botschafters: Diff modulo base, a CLI tool to assist with incremental code reviews
One of the challenges of reviewing a lot of code is that many reviews require multiple iterations. I really don't want to do a full review from scratch on the second and subsequent rounds. I need to be able to see what has changed since last time.
I happen to work on projects that care about having a useful Git history. This means that authors of (without loss of generality) pull requests use amend and rebase to change commits and force-push the result. I would like to see the only the changes they made since my last review pass. Especially when the author also rebased onto a new version of the main branch, existing code review tools tend to break down.
Git has a little-known built-in subcommand, git range-diff, which I had been using for a while. It's pretty cool, really: It takes two ranges of commits, old and new, matches old and new commits, and then shows how they changed. The rather huge problem is that its output is a diff of diffs. Trying to make sense of those quickly becomes headache-inducing.
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppFastFloat 0.0.4 on CRAN: New Upstream
A new release of RcppFastFloat arrived on CRAN yesterday. The package wraps fast_float, another nice library by Daniel Lemire. For details, see the arXiv paper showing that one can convert character representations of ‘numbers’ into floating point at rates at or exceeding one gigabyte per second.
This release updates the underlying fast_float library version. Special thanks to Daniel Lemire for quickly accomodating a parsing use case we had encode as a test, namely with various whitespace codes. The default in fast_float, as in C++17, is to be more narrow but we enable the wider use case via two #define statements.
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This Python Logic Trick Is AMAZING #python #coding #programming - Invidious
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Ubuntu Summit and Calamares | [bobulate]
Time flies when you’re swamped. The Ubuntu Summit 2022 was months ago already. Jon has written about it. Heather has written about it. Me, I got COVID there (in Prague, not necessarily at the conference) and won’t write about that, but do want to be enthusiastic about it. Better very late than never.
[...]
Meeting some of my online friends – people like Simon Quigley of Lubuntu with whom I’ve worked for years around Calamares, but never met before. And now we have, and drank beer together (or was it wine? it was certainly later in the evening). So there was a bit of talk about Calamares development and how it’s slowed down in community mode. More on that another time.
Meeting up with people from Akademy – Mauro, Luca, Aleix, Harald, Jon, Pedro – was keen as well, although it did drive home that between events I get very little KDE coding done.
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Sci-fi film prop doubles as a DJ helmet | Arduino Blog
Take a moment to think about some of your favorite electronic music DJs. How many of them wear some sort of a helmet or mask? You can probably think of at least a few. For whatever reason, DJs like their privacy. Daniel Aagentah was tasked with making a sci-fi film prop helmet and decided to use it for DJing, too. The result is this cool sci-fi-themed, audio-reactive headpiece that incorporates an Arduino-controlled display.
Aagentah is part of a team working on an indie sci-fi movie being filmed in Manchester, England. He was assigned the job of constructing a helmet for a character costume and this is the result. He made the helmet out of every cosplayer’s favorite material: EVA foam sheet. That is a lightweight and strong material that is easy to cut and form. He carefully worked that EVA foam into a helmet shape, then gave it a coat of silver paint that we all know is synonymous with the future. The final touch was a seven-segment display mounted where the eyes should be.