Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 27, 2023

• Shader Variants

  Background of Shaders One particular facet of modern graphics development that is often a pain – even for AAA games — is shader variants!

• Andy Wingo: structure and interpretation of flutter

  Good day, gentle hackfolk. Like an old-time fiddler I would appear to be deep in the groove, playing endless variations on a theme, in this case mobile application frameworks. But one can only recognize novelty in relation to the familiar, and today's note is a departure: we are going to look at Flutter, a UI toolkit based not on JavaScript but on the Dart language.

  The present, from the past

  Where to start, even? The problem is big enough that I'll approach it from three different angles: from the past, from the top, and from the bottom.

  With the other frameworks we looked at, we didn't have to say much about their use of JavaScript. JavaScript is an obvious choice, in 2023 at least: it is ubiquitous, has high quality implementations, and as a language it is quite OK and progressively getting better. Up to now, "always bet on JS" has had an uninterrupted winning streak.

  But winning is not the same as unanimity, and Flutter and Dart represent an interesting pole of contestation. To understand how we got here, we have to go back in time. Ten years ago, JavaScript just wasn't a great language: there were no modules, no async functions, no destructuring, no classes, no extensible iteration, no optional arguments to functions. In addition it was hobbled with a significant degree of what can only be called accidental sloppiness: with which can dynamically alter a lexical scope, direct eval that can define new local variables, Function.caller, and so on. Finally, larger teams were starting to feel the need for more rigorous language tooling that could use types to prohibit some classes of invalid programs.

• GNU Guix: The Full-Source Bootstrap: Building from source all the way down

  We are delighted and somewhat relieved to announce that the third reduction of the Guix bootstrap binaries has now been merged in the main branch of Guix! If you run guix pull today, you get a package graph of more than 22,000 nodes rooted in a 357-byte program—something that had never been achieved, to our knowledge, since the birth of Unix.

  We refer to this as the Full-Source Bootstrap. In this post, we explain what this means concretely. This is a major milestone—if not the major milestone—in our quest for building everything from source, all the way down.

  How did we get there, and why? In two previous blog posts, we elaborated on why this reduction and bootstrappability in general is so important.

  One reason is to properly address supply chain security concerns.

• Textual: a framework for terminal user interfaces

  For developers seeking to create applications with terminal user interfaces (TUIs), options have been relatively limited compared to the vast number of graphical user interface (GUI) frameworks available. As a result, many command-line applications reinvent the same user interface elements. Textual aims to remedy this: it's a rapid-application-development framework for Python TUI applications. Offering cross-platform support, Textual incorporates layouts, CSS-like styles, and an expanding collection of widgets.

  While colors, interactivity, and all sorts of widgets are standard features in graphical applications, terminal applications are often a bit more basic. And although many terminal applications support the mouse, it's an exception to see scroll bars, clickable links, and buttons. Python developer Will McGugan saw an opportunity there, and started working on Textual in 2021.

• This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 492

  Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust!