Technical

The times before the advent of compute shaders, twenty years ago, were heroic. GPU came out of infancy into adolescence: the pace of innovation was breathtaking. A year without new GPU architecture was unthinkable. You could see new programming languages and APIs appearing one after another, bringing us closer and closer to “real-time photorealistic rendering”

When working with images as a software engineer, color may seem a straightforward concept. After decoding an image you typically end up with an array of pixel values, each a tuple of three integer components. These components generally are “RGB” and so the value (255, 0, 0) must denote red, (0, 255, 0) is green,

It’s one of the age-old problems of software development: You’ve started a new project, set up fancy CI infrastructure, and everything works well. But as time goes on, you add more and more features to the project. Compile-times on your local checkout of the projects are mostly fine as you are used to incremental compilation,

In our line of work, performing low-level performance optimization, the compiler is less of a language abstraction and more of a tool to directly interact with. Compilers are complex machines. Correctly converting C++-like code to assembly instructions is a gigantic challenge, producing optimized instructions even more so. It is therefore no surprise that the compiler

Anyone who has written a non-trivial GPU kernel has hit the same wall. You define a struct in C++ and pass it to a kernel. Six months later, somebody adds a member, forgets to update the matching layout on the device side, and a 200-line shader reads garbage. The compiler doesn’t help. The runtime doesn’t

Disclaimer: LLMs were used for proof-reading and grammar check. C++20 gave us coroutines. The machinery needed was included: co_yield, co_return, co_await but the standard library had no concrete coroutine types. You had to write your own promise type, your own iterator, your own bookkeeping. The complexity of this boilerplate was intimidating for most people. C++23