making apps, making webs.

Contemporary C tooling for making higher quality C, faster or more safely. DRAFT 0 - 10/11/18,  DRAFT 1 - 9/16/19, 7:19 PM, I'm still working on this, but it's already useful and I'd like some feedback - so I decided to share it early. DRAFT 2 - 10/1/19, mostly additions to static analysis tools. DRAFT 3 - 10/4/19, updates on build systems, package management, and complexity analysis.  DRAFT 4 - 10/6/19, run time dynamic verification and instrumentation, sanitizers (asan/ubsan/etc), performance tools, static analyzers. DRAFT 5 - C interpreter(s).  DRAFT 6 - 11/6/19 , mention TermDebug vim,  more windows debugging tools, C drawing for intro. In 2001 or so people started using the phrase "Modern C++". So now that it's 2019, I guess we're in the post modern era? Anyway, this isn't a post about C++ code, but some of this information applies there too. No logo, but it's used everywhere. Welcome to the post modern era. S...

So, I started writing this for people who want to 'contribute' to Community projects, and also Free Libre or Open source projects. Maybe you'd like to get involved, but are unsure of where to begin? Follow along with this tutorial, and peek at the end in the "what is a git for?" section for explanations of what some of the words mean. Draft 1, 2018/07/18 - initial draft. Draft 2, 2019/11/04 - two full unit test examples, assertions, making a pull request, use python 3 unittest substring search, "good first issue" is a thing now. Started "What is a git for? Jargon" section. Draft 3, 2020/12/12 - default branch name is main. What's first? A test is first. A unit test is a piece of code which tests one thing works well in isolation from other parts of software. In this guide, I'm going to explain how to write one using the standard python unittest module, for the pygame game library. You can apply this advice to most python pr...

In the article on his blog Peter asks " How much faster is Redis at storing a blob of JSON compared to PostgreSQL? ". Answer: 14x slower. Seems about right. Usually Redis is about 4x faster for a simple query like that compared to using PostgreSQL as a cache in my experience. It's why so many people use Redis as a cache. But I'd suggest PostgreSQL is good enough to act as a cache for many people. Django is pretty slow at fetching from PostgreSQL compared to other python options, so this could explain part of the 14x VS 4x difference. Note that Django should be adding an index because of ForeignKey. However it's possible it isn't being used, or the table may need to analyze stats again. Also note that Django does not support prepared statements built in, and when you don't use prepared statements you do not use the PostgreSQL query cache. Prepared statements can give a 50% speedup often, because they don't have to do the query parsing and do a n...

TLDR; less performance spikes, faster average performance, PyPy is a good Python for games and multimedia apps on desktop systems, running GC in a thread is a good idea for GIL releasing apps. In March 2018 at the PyPy winter sprint I spent some days working on improving pygame support on PyPy. Part of this was investigating pypy frame drop . In there I found PyPy had both lower average performance in this pygame-using-CPython-API benchmark, and had spikes which caused frame drops. Remember that in latency sensitive applications performance spikes are not allowed. Note that not very much of this code is pure python (where PyPy is fastest), so it's almost a worst case benchmark for PyPy performance. Thanks to Antonio, the PyPy team and their supporters — things have much improved since then. One improvement in particular is that PyPy now allows more control of when the Garbage Collection does its work. Read more about it in the blog post " PyPy for low latency systems ...

#yearofthedesktop is a long running joke in FLOSS communities. When will Linux be more popular than Windows on the Desktop? (please hold back your laughter until the end). Let me explain why this is the Year of the Desktop, and why community developed software will win (and in fact has already). TLDR; most PC hardware vendors are shipping Linux machines, Linux had the best cheap laptop of the year, Linux is a good platform for games, Steam now supports 1000s of Windows apps(+ 5000 linux native) and is contributing to Wine, the web is a good high quality desktop software target, government support for Linux desktop is increasing, and even Microsoft is supporting running Linux software on Windows, cheap hardware like Raspberry Pi(and more) is available and usable, community software cares about usability and has a supporting financial model, community development is a kinder place, fragmentation of the Desktop is no more, Gnome receives $1,000,000 donation, governments spe...