Top all-time · #808
Aras' website
Personal blog · aras-p.info/blog · on HN as aras_pprogrammingsystems
Aras' website is a personal blog at aras-p.info about programming and systems. Since 2010, 80 different Hacker News readers have linked it 171 times, most often “Vector math library codegen in Debug”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-05, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 7 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for graphics and performance writing: C++ compile times, hash function tests, Gaussian splatting, SDF font rendering and Unity's data-oriented ECS.
- Recommended for · 7 comments
- Called 'a really good starting point' and 'an interesting blog series'; another says it gives 'a pretty good summary'.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Vector math library codegen in Debug8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2024-09-15
- Gaussian Splatting is pretty cool6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2023-09-07
- “Modern” C++ Lamentations (2018)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-04-14
- Surface-Stable Fractal Dither on Playdate5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2025-02-09
- Making Gaussian Splats more smaller5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-09-27
- Speeding up Blender .obj export4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2022-02-03
- Time-trace: timeline/flame chart profiler for Clang4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-01-17
- More Hash Function Tests4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2016-08-10
- Making Gaussian Splats Smaller3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-09-13
- /blog/2017/02/15/Font-Rendering-is-Getting-Interesting/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-02-24
What Hacker News says?
I think C is an exceptional good language for a long time, but the world is changing and maybe C must evolve with new trends, new researches in programming languages. In my view C and C++ now almost different languages with a different philosophy of programming, different future, and different language design. It will be sad if "modern" C++ almost replace C. Many C++ developers use "Orthodoxy C++" https://gist.githu…
Comment linking /blog/2018/12/28/Modern-C-Lamentations/
on “Tell HN: C Experts Panel – Ask us anything about C”Submitted I accidentally Blender VSE as a story · 511 points
HN discussionAt least the image scaling does not appear to be in linear? Going by the notes in [0]: Gimp and stb_image_resize results are subtly different from others, even for Bilinear. Looks like they do convert source sRGB image to linear, do filtering there, and convert back to sRGB. You can definitely see that as a problem with bright lines (e.g. collar highlight in einar*.png) being darker in the upscaled Blender versions.…
Comment linking /img/misc/upsample_filter_comp_2024/
on “I accidentally Blender VSE”Submitted “Modern” C++ Lamentations as a story · 347 points
HN discussionThat does just do CMake time. Sorry if my comment was confusing. I forgot that I used a wrapper or something myself to collect the compile times. Anyway, my point is, you aren't the first person to have this issue. I've definitely profiled compile times before and viewed a flame graph with some gadget made by Google. The easiest way you to do it may depend on your compiler and build system. You could attack the prob…
Comment linking /blog/2019/01/16/time-trace-timeline-flame-chart-profiler-for-Clang/
on “I made a real-time C/C++/Rust build visualizer”Submitted Swallowing the elephant into Blender as a story · 302 points
HN discussionThree things I suppose, coming at it from having worked on medium-to-largeish game development efforts: 0. Graphics APIs come far down the list of things people think about when planning a project. Platform support (or lack thereof) is driven by other concerns. It's a business or political decision, based on platform popularity (hence my original comment), not a technical one. Options for handling a skill shortfall…
Comment linking /blog/2014/03/28/cross-platform-shaders-in-2014/
on “Metal – Apple’s new graphics API”Submitted Curious lack of sprintf scaling as a story · 204 points
HN discussionIt's Unity's (the game engine) new Entity-Component-System, the blog post is an answer to this presentation: http://aras-p.info/texts/files/2018Academy%20-%20ECS-DoD.pdf Unity's traditional entity system is suffering from a number of "OOP-isms" which make it hard/impossible to optimize for performance. The new ECS strictly follows a Data-Oriented-Design approach, where everything is built around laying out the data…
Comment linking /texts/files/2018Academy%20-%20ECS-DoD.pdf
on “OOP Is Dead, Long Live OOP”Submitted Hash Functions all the way down as a story · 148 points
HN discussion> Blender video editor is ... slow Might be time to think about trying Blender again. This was posted here on HN about a month ago. https://aras-p.info/blog/2024/02/06/I-accidentally-Blender-V...
Comment linking /blog/2024/02/06/I-accidentally-Blender-VSE/
on “Kdenlive 24.02 open source video editor released”Submitted Surface-Stable Fractal Dither on Playdate as a story · 146 points
HN discussionIf anyone else is wondering what SDF is, a bit of googling found me this blog post: https://aras-p.info/blog/2017/02/15/Font-Rendering-is-Gettin... It gives a pretty good summary and a lot of other vocab words you can google, and touches on the Pathfinder project
Comment linking /blog/2017/02/15/Font-Rendering-is-Getting-Interesting/
on “Microsoft’s HoloLens 2: a $3,500 mixed-reality headset for the factory”Submitted “Modern” C++ Lamentations (2018) as a story · 146 points
HN discussionThis reminds me of a blog post from one of the Unity developers: We joke that doing anything in C# will result in an XML parser being included somewhere. This is not that far from the truth; e.g. calling float.ToString() will pull in whole internationalization system, which probably somewhere needs to read some global XML configuration file to figure out whether daylight savings time is active when Eastern European…
Comment linking /blog/2009/11/14/improving-cmono-for-games/
on “I want to compile a C program so simple I can explain all of the assembly”Submitted Lossless Float Image Compression as a story · 116 points
HN discussionThe blog posts from Aras are a really good starting point: https://aras-p.info/blog/2023/09/05/Gaussian-Splatting-is-pr...
Comment linking /blog/2023/09/05/Gaussian-Splatting-is-pretty-cool/
on “Show HN: SuperSplat – open-source 3D Gaussian Splat Editor”Submitted Random Thoughts about Unity as a story · 107 points
HN discussionOh I don't doubt that Microsoft politics and their "own the API" policy helped hurt adoption of OpenGL on Windows, but blaming the state of OpenGL on non-Windows platforms on Microsoft is giving them a little too much credit. The ARB was just as much at fault. Apple has had a lot invested in OpenGL, both on the desktop and OpenGL ES and in theory has just as much pull (if not more) as MS, and hasn't done much to imp…
Comment linking /blog/2011/03/04/mobile-graphics-api-wishlist-performance/
on “The Tale of OpenGL vs. Direct3D”Submitted How does a GPU shader core work? [pdf] as a story · 98 points
HN discussionIt’s all fun and games until you actually use it in a non-trivial scale and you experience compilation times go through the roof. (Your Debug builds will also be really slow.) It’s just not a good feature to use in the current state of C++. https://aras-p.info/blog/2018/12/28/Modern-C-Lamentations/
Comment linking /blog/2018/12/28/Modern-C-Lamentations/
on “A Tour of C++ (Third edition)”Submitted Entity Component Systems and Data Oriented Design [pdf] as a story · 82 points
HN discussionA wild guess would be that OS X drivers contain poor shader optimizer. Parallels probably work by decompiling DirectX shader bytecode back into GLSL, which is already optimized for OS X shader compiler, therefore there is less burden on the optimizer. Another example of poor drivers are various GLES drivers on mobile, mostly trivial optimizations can drastically increase the performance: http://aras-p.info/blog/2010…
Comment linking /blog/2010/09/29/glsl-optimizer/
on “Portal 2 Beta for Linux officially released”Submitted SPIR-V Compression as a story · 77 points
HN discussionAnyone reading this will probably also be interested in his related post: https://aras-p.info/blog/2022/02/03/Speeding-up-Blender-.obj...
Comment linking /blog/2022/02/03/Speeding-up-Blender-.obj-export/
on “Curious lack of sprintf scaling”Submitted Fast Blur with Animated Radius as a story · 40 points
HN discussionPeople have said this since the early days of Vulkan (such as https://aras-p.info/blog/2015/03/13/thoughts-on-explicit-gra... ), but so far nothing has really materialized.
Comment linking /blog/2015/03/13/thoughts-on-explicit-graphics-apis/
on “Vulkan update: version 1.2 conformance for Raspberry Pi 4”Submitted Forced Inlining Might Be Slow as a story · 34 points
HN discussionPeople were teasing the idea of a good-enough Metal-like API on top of Vulkan that takes care of the pain points since the early days (most notably this article: https://aras-p.info/blog/2015/03/13/thoughts-on-explicit-gra... ), but so far, nothing has materialized.
Comment linking /blog/2015/03/13/thoughts-on-explicit-graphics-apis/
on “Vulkan update: version 1.2 conformance for Raspberry Pi 4”Submitted A Unity Dev's Thoughts on the New Graphics APIs as a story · 17 points
HN discussion
