Small things

This last week hasn’t seen much exciting code so there isn’t too much to write up.

I’m still dreaming up some way to wrangle data in my games in a way that maximizes performance whilst keeping live redefinition in tact, however this isn’t even fully formed in my head yet so there is no code to show or even speak of. However I’ve been increasingly interested in relational databases recently. The fact that you only define the layout of your table data and queries, and that the system just works out what other passes as intermediate data-structures it needs to work best is pretty sweet. You can get a free book on mssql query optimizer here.

CppCon is also out, here are a few good talks I’ve been watching so far:

• Carl Cook “When a Microsecond Is an Eternity: High Performance Trading Systems in C++”
• Matt Godbolt “What Has My Compiler Done for Me Lately? Unbolting the Compiler’s Lid”
• P. McKenney, M. Michael & M. Wong “Is Parallel Programming still hard?” (spoiler..yes)
• Olivier Giroux “Designing (New) C++ Hardware”

I’ve also just had a book on Garbage Collection delivered. YAY! It’s another one of those amazing computer systems where you get to directly impact people, but without having the deal with horrible human factors (like unicode & dates & BLEEEEGHH). I’m pretty stoked to work through this book.

Other than this researchy stuff I’ve still been streaming. Last week we played with a physics engine and tonight we are going to implement chromatic aberration :) I’m pretty happy with where the streaming has been going, the nerve wracking part of the process these days is finding things I can do in the two hours rather than the stream itself.

That’ll do for now, seeya next week