I woke up this morning and started implementing

Question

I woke up this morning and started implementing <https www inkandswitch com potluck |Potluck> for myself I want this in my toolbox but a browser is just not convivial enough

Kartik Agaram · Answer

Stack 12kLoC of C 5MB download depends on a minimal graphics stack 25kLoC of Lua for a GUI toolkit 5kLoC of Lua Properties of this stack minimal dependencies cross platform runs on Windows

Konrad Hinsen · Answer

I really like how you are exploring the space of minimal dependencies while remaining practically usable in today s computing environment

Kartik Agaram · Answer

Ok I may have under estimated how much work Potluck will be To build Potluck I need the ability to render tables and to render tables that I can type into I really need a DOM Prev gen GUI toolkits like LoveFrames won t cut it I need the ability to dynamically adjust dimensions as contents change Hence this detour The good news I don t need much The format is just literal Lua table syntax Each node div contains either text a row of nodes or a column of nodes Other supported attributes `fg` `bg` colors and `margin` that acts like `margin top` or `margin left` depending on whether the parent has rows or columns

Jack Rusher · Answer

One very nice trick from the scheme community is the tag is really just the name of a function approach taken by et al

Konrad Hinsen · Answer

Interesting In particular This is a nightmare if you imagine this turning into some sort of long lived standard with versions and compatibility guarantees I don t I just want an app internal format for creating UIs with very little code Craft rather than industrial design I d love to see more experiments in this space I see my own Leibniz projects there as well though for a much more specialized application domain This now makes me wonder if I should try to go for full craft i e provide Leibniz export in craft friendly data formats rather than industry standard ones XML etc

Kartik Agaram · Answer

It s an interesting lens Do you see any drawbacks to the industry standard approach for your projects I m wondering if there are drawbacks you ve always been aware of but you re starting to weight them differently

Konrad Hinsen · Answer

The drawbacks of industry standards are often 1 a steep learning curve and 2 too much rigidity Consider XML Even with XML libraries available for all major programming languages extracting data from a particular XML schema is a lot of work and modifying the schema for an experimental extension is even worse

Konrad Hinsen · Answer

On the other hand when archiving data I definitely do want to follow industry standards So it s not a question of choosing the better option but of supporting both

Kartik Agaram · Answer

This was surprisingly hard making the animation smoother by drawing to a texture just once I learned two things Just how slow LÖVE is On my 1 4GHz core laptop running Linux an empty app just initializing graphics every frame runs at barely 60fps 15ms frame It s very easy to overflow even 30fps I don t know if my standards are too high but the way LÖVE does texture mapping is a little weird <https codeberg org akkartik driver love commit 207ebfae36902cb18a1d2fcf5e31e6301ad5a2e0>

Nils Berg · Answer

I looked into it a bit because I felt like those performance numbers sounded suspicious Looks like there is or was 14+ years ago no mouth a driver level bug with vsync <https love2d org forums viewtopic php t=116|https love2d org forums viewtopic php t=116> Maybe the bug is actually in the mechanism LÖVE uses to enable vsync but either way I am pretty convinced that disabling vsync should solve your performance problems

Kartik Agaram · Answer

Doesn t disabling vsync have its own risks and caveats I don t really know what I m doing there

Nils Berg · Answer

The only I can think of is tearing which is annoying at worst and shouldn t be an issue unless your render code is actually the bottleneck Okay and maybe some timing stuff if you were using frame numbers instead of wall clock Caveat I m not a graphics person by trade but I did take some computer graphics classes and am a bit of a gaming nerd upside down face

Kartik Agaram · Answer

Definitely sounds worth a try Thanks

Kartik Agaram · Answer

I just tried it and yes the empty app went from 15ms frame to 0 005ms frame without vsync It s a little different from your link in that my CPU doesn t get pegged with vsync But it does introduce a non busy wait Unfortunately this doesn t affect my app s initial animation If I bump back to before my recent texture mapping changes and try it with without vsync I see no perceptible difference I might have been able to find an alternative way to speed up the animation though if I d disabled vsync I m going to disable vsync going forward It seems clear that any drawback stemming from this decision is going to be very obvious so no reason not to try it

Nils Berg · Answer

Hm If it wasn t busy waiting and you didn t see improvement on your actual workload then it sounds like vsync wasn t actually causing your problem Put another way to run your app at 60fps something must take 15ms and if you re not doing any actual work the draw function will be that something But yeah it s likely that turning vsync off won t hurt either slightly smiling face

Kartik Agaram · Answer

One bit of follow up it turns out that disabling vsync increases CPU utilization quite dramatically from 2 3 to 20 for an empty app Non empty apps increase even more I noticed this when my laptop s fan started coming on something that has seldom happened My mental model now is that without vsync LÖVE just cranks through frames as quickly as possible It won t make a difference if there s lots to do between frames but 0 work will lead to infinite fps approximately Obviously I d love to hear if this logic seems flawed

wtaysom · Answer

That reminds me of that one time in StarCraft II some scene on Raynor s spaceship with an especially low polycount fried one of my MacBooks

Kartik Agaram · Answer

My environment now has tests In this 1 minute animation you can see me make a change that breaks some tests The edges of my vision go red I zoom out to see what broke I can click on places on the map to zoom in Exposé like on failing tests <https git sr ht ~akkartik driver love>