Here's a small update on programming related stuff.

Code Formatter

I think pretty much every developer has heard about the "Tabs vs Spaces" debate before, which only shows one thing: Development tools are pretty bad. A good IDE should be able to just handle either encoding and display the indentation as the user desires.

Given that I recently decided to try out using an indentation width of 2 instead of 4 (and I've seen people use the widths 1,2,3,4 and 8), the encoding which makes the most sense to me is

1. Tabs for indentation and
2. Spaces for alignment.

That way the indentation is consistent, while just the display of tabs may change. But of course whenever more than one developer is involved, usually:

• Tabs are inserted to align, which obviously doesn't work and just fucks shit up
• The perceived indentation is wrong due to a clusterfuck of whitespace
• This also leads to a lot of commits with changes in lines where only the whitespace is modified, meaning the diff is now useless or full of noise

I am often using (neo)vim, which, at least with my configuration, only fucks with the indentation. In comparison, IDEs not only fuck the indentation up, but they also tend to do """helpful""" formats like the following:

I think vim handles the indentation fine if I format the whole file; but it does tend to insert the wrong characters (tabs for alignment) when writing the line initially. As I often forget to format the file completely, one alternative would be to have a dedicated code formatter, which you could automatically run on the changed files before pushing a commit with git [0]. Big downside: Tools like clang-format and Indent require lots of configuring if you just want it to do the indentation / alignment thingy. I'm not even sure whether there was a tool which just does that. bcpp could fit the bill, but I'm not sure from the description whether it supports mixing these two properly.

So that's how I ended up with my weekend project cif. cif just does the formatting and alignment for C code. It handles some things like strings, comments and preprocessor formatting, but it will do its job wrong if you e.g. want to open scopes using macros. I setup a hotkey for vim and a hook for git, so I'm all set [1].

Static Website Generator Experiments

Due to the Performance Aware Programming Course, I wanted to see whether I can speedup some memory allocations. The results were mixed and I'm annoyed.

Good news: There was some real low hanging fruit. During the initialization of the threads, I allocate a lot of memory, because the pages on linux are only mapped to physical memory once the pages are written to once. But I did a whoopsie and called ArenaAllocateZero instead of ArenaAllocate in my code on big buffers of memory. While this helps with tracking down uninitilized memory bugs, it's a waste of work (assuming that my program is written correctly). Not doing that speeds up the generator by ~50-100ms. So it's not really a big concern, but now this website is generated in ~15ms (when in cache), which is pretty awesome.

The other "quick" thing I wanted to test was using larger (memory) pages. Given the time scale I am working with, I thought that generating less page faults might be beneficial, especially because linux, in contrast to Windows, doesn't require elevated privileges to use large pages. Or so I thought. After adding MAP_HUGETLB and MAP_HUGE_2MB to the arguments passed into my mmap call, my memory allocation failed. From what I gathered, it seems like you need to pass some additional flags to the kernel on boot such that these larger pages are actually allocated [2].

I also want to look into getting rid of memory-mapped files and replacing them with good ol' read calls. However, that change would require a bunch more adjustments to my code, so that will have to wait.

Quick Update:

I found and fixed some multi-threading bugs (static variables are not thread-safe, whoopsie). Personal websites are still building within ~15ms (when in cache), while the test site with 20k posts now builds within 600ms (when in cache). Pretty happy about that.

Other Programming Projects

I'm working on a matrix client with a friend. Progress has been slow because most of the work is either juggling some C# bullshit or figuring out the various steps and formats which matrix expects. So far we have:

• Retrieve login methods
• Login with password
• Using the libOlm library, create an account with public/private (and onetime / recovery) keys
• Serialize this account to/from disk (libOlm is actually somewhat nice to use)
• Uploading public keys onto the server
• Retrieving public keys from the server
• Getting the initial sync request to retrieve a mapping from users to room IDs

But this all is written in a "sandbox"-y / fucking around kind of way, meaning we don't even have a window open yet. I hope once we manage to send + receive encrypted text messages that we can actually turn this experiment into something somewhat usable.

Additionally, given my recent usage of Neovide, I dig the smooth animations but I'm hitting more shortcomings of neovim. While these probably could be fixed with more plugins / an LSP / ..., I'm kind of tempted to roll my own text editor for C programming. At least my short list of requirements seems somewhat reasonable, if I am able to get OpenGL to cooperate:

• Pixel perfect bitmap font display / scaling
• The smooth animations of Neovide (which actually help navigating the code when jumping around in my opinion)
• keep a low startup time
• be able to run build scripts and parse the output such that I can jump from error to error
• have some rudimentary C parsing to be able to
  • Jump to definition
  • Show program arguments
  • List functions
  • ...
• Maybe have a nice way of changing folders / files than neovim

And I still need to work on my C debugger. Probably some update of GCC shuffled some debug information around, which lead to me needing to fix the hardcoded values of the debugger. It would be really badass if I am able to get it into a usable state. But hey, I managed to recod a little demo video which I'm gonna put / link to on my resume, so that's gotta be worth something.