Computer ramblings, randomly sampled

TL;DR: Just don’t! Git, binary files, and LFS Storing binary files directly in git is something you might be interested in doing, but it wasn’t really designed for that purpose to begin with. Git is good at versioning text files, not binaries! In short: Git by default doesn’t generate diffs for binaries and versions the complete history for each file, which will cause your .git folder to explode in size over time....

Alright, mad scientist time: you guys know about Zig? This language in interesting in itself and I recommend you check it out if you didn’t before, but for today we’re staying in magical C++ land. Got the idea from this blog post that I could use the Zig compiler as replacement for Clang, GCC and MSVC in my engine and stop having to use Visual Studio on windows. Sounds enticing, right?...

After porting my CHIP-8 emulator to Zig (repo on GitHub) and writing about it, I decided to come back for some fun and wanted to try my hand on building a small game from the ground up. Sometimes you win Sometimes you lose Sweeping the mines Here’s a few pain points I noticed coming back to Zig for the second time: Pointers: Zig has several pointer types, and it can be confusing sometimes when choosing....

After porting a CHIP-8 emulator to Rust (repo on GitHub), I decided to come back to trying new languages, feeling like Rust isn’t at a state where I would consider writing new code in it. So if not Rust, what kind shiny new thing is around on the block? Zig Zig has been around some time now, the community is active but didn’t grow into large scale yet. It seems to aim at low-level programmers, as a safer alternative to C with a lean feature set and better performance....

Time for reinventing the wheel again! Shadertoy is great and all, but I didn’t find it super comfortable to use. Can’t use your own editor Browsers eat my battery! Instead of staying mad at things, I took this as a learning opportunity and made an offline version. Introducing: Prototoy! Prototoy is a rather simple program, it allows you to load a shader from your disk, show it in a window and watch for file changes to hot reload it....