tl;dr: I ported my CHIP-8 emulator to Rust. Amongst game dev circles, Rust is certainly getting a lot of attention recently, especially since Ready At Dawn announced they would be switching entirely to Rust for newly-written code. This is certainly a big thing, coming from such an experienced studio (we gamedevs are notoriously picky when adopting new libraries/languages), and proves that Rust is taken seriously for replacing C++. Personally, I tend to dislike C++ and its ecosystem, and couldn’t be happier that new languages try address the need for a superior paradigm....

Thought it was a fun idea to implement a very basic emulator so I did just that! My CHIP-8 emu can run most vanilla ROMs without problems. It’s a simple 8bits computer with a rather reduced instruction set, so it wasn’t too much pain to get things going. I used the publicly available ROMs for testing as well as a bunch of custom unit tests. I have to say it was a fun little side projet, especially since I didn’t have to write any of the games for it, just load that ROM and here we go!...

I still find good old manpages really useful for coding, their long lifetime made them reliable and well integrated into a lot of tools (vim in my case). What’s more satisfying than accessing the exact doc you’re looking for in a couple of keystrokes? It’s hard to go back to browsing HTML docs after that… Imagine the sadness when Khronos stopped supporting the vulkan API manpages! Long story short, I tried to add the support upstream (see PR #839), ended up keeping an unofficial fork and released something usable there (formatting is still weird sometimes)....

Raytracers are one of those cool programs that you can write in a few hours and already have something fun to play with. I never got to write one at school so I figured I would spend a day or two and get one going! Because many other sources recommend it, I downloaded Peter Shirley’s book Ray tracing in one weekend and gave it a go. Even though I was familiar with the concepts, it was a good exercise and also surprisingly fun!...

I got into low-level shader optimizations lately, and realised that not many tools are provided for the job. Since i’m looking at GCN assembly regularly now, i used the occasion to write a decent syntax highlighting for it inside vim. That way i got to go through the whole GCN ISA document (props to AMD for having the only public GPU ISA out there) as well as learning some vim scripting basics!...