Another bit of gold from #ICFP2023 by Pjotr Prins of the University of Tennessee. The actual title of the talk is "Why code in Python+C if you can code in Lisp+Zig?" but the "Lisp" in this case is actually Guile Scheme. I didn't know this, but Zig uses the C ABI so it binds to any language that can do FFI bindings to C, including most Scheme and Common Lisp implementations. But why don't I just post the abstract here:
> "Most bioinformatics software today is written in Python and for performance C is used. Lisp has been around for over half a century and here I don’t have to tell how or why programming Lisp is great. I will talk about Zig as a minimalistic new language that is unapologetically focused on performance, tellingly with a blazingly fast compiler. It is advertised as a replacement for Thompson, Ritchie, and Kernighan’s C, but it may even replace C++ in places. Zig uses the C-ABI and does not do garbage collection, so it is ideal for binding against other languages. In this talk I will present combining GNU Guile Lisp with Zig. I’ll argue that everyone needs two languages: one for quick coding and one for performance. With Guile and Zig you get both at the same time and you won’t have to fight the Rust borrow checker either."
#HowToThing#026 — Shader meta-programming techniques (functional composition, higher-order functions, compile-time evaluation, dynamic code generation etc.) to generate animated plots/graphs of 16 functions (incl. dynamic grid layout generation) within a single WebGL fragment shader.
Today's key packages:
https://thi.ng/shader-ast: DSL to write (fully type-checked) shaders directly in TypeScript and later compile them to GLSL, JS (and other target languages, i.e. there's partial support for Houdini VEX and [very] early stage WGSL...)
https://thi.ng/shader-ast-stdlib: Collection of ~220 re-usable shader functions & configurable building blocks (incl. SDFs primitives/ops, raymarching, lighting, matrix ops, etc.)
https://thi.ng/webgl-shadertoy: Minimal scaffolding for experimenting with fragment shaders (supports both normal GLSL or shader-ast flavors/compilation)
If you're new to the Shader-AST approach (highly likely!), this example will again introduce a lot of new concepts, hopefully in digestible manner! Please also always consult the package readmes (and other linked examples) for more background info... There're numerous benefits to this approach (incl. targetting different target langs and compositional & optimization aspects which are impossible to achieve (at least not elegantly) via just string concatenation/interpolation of shader code, as is much more commonplace...)
This example comes fresh off the back of yesterday's new easing function additions (by @Yura), though we're only showing a subset here...
To achieve a better sample size, I'd highly appreciate if you could circulate the link to this survey in your own networks.
It's already been almost 9 years since the last user survey for these projects. Please help me/us to get more insights into your own experiences, your interests, hopes and pain points — allowing the projects and everyone involved to move forward more intentionally.
There're 15 questions here, with ~10 of them marked as mandatory. The main focal points are the matrices in the middle of the survey. Please also do use the final freeform comments box to share any further feedback you might have. Thank you very much for your interest, trust & taking the time to provide some much needed answers! 🙏
The survey is anonymous and will remain open until 23:59 (CET) on February 29, 2024. I will then share a public summary of the results on my Mastodon in the days following (do keep an eye on the #ThingUmbrella hashtag)...
「 Furthermore, the lightweight threading model of Haskell is great for web-server purposes: we handle thousands of requests per second on quite low-end hardware. Interestingly, our CI server that does compilation needs a lot more RAM than our production servers, which is the price you pay for having strong compile-time guarantees, and thereby the efficient runtime 」
If you are into programming languages, learning Ocaml (or other ML dialect like StandardML) makes a lot of sense, it's helpful for reading papers, watching conference talks, understanding basics of type theory, going through PL courses and all other fancy stuff.
Here is a good introductionary course on OCaml and functional programming:
For real, whoever is saying that F# or OCaml require a PhD in Math or are languages just for math, science, and academic stuff is completely lying to you, it is no harder than learning JavaScript/python or any other language out there.
We are organizing the FP Dag aka Dutch Functional Programming Day on Friday the 5th of January in Delft. People from neighboring countries are also very welcome to join!
The (soft) registration deadline is on the 22th of December (next Friday), so get your tickets soon!
fp-ts brought advanced #FunctionalProgramming to #TypeScript. Now a related project implementing an effect system for TypeScript (effect-ts) seems to have gotten a lot of VC money. Interesting... Docs look very polished, not sure how they will make money though.
The GHC developers are very pleased to announce the release of GHC 9.10.1! 🎉
On the menu:
→ GHC2024 language edition
→ Linear let and where
bindings
→ Annotation of exceptions with backtraces
→ Required type arguments for functions
→ Javascript FFI support in the WebAssembly backend
… and many more!