Render to texture

We, (that is Sriram and myself) just got our render to texture facility working. We drew a quad and and then generated some funny patterns in the pixel shader. It was fun. My first gpu side hacking. More of it is coming along soon, I promise.

Haskell and fractals.

I recently came across Fraqtive. Very nice program. And well optimized and well written too, by the looks of it. It automatically takes care of multithreading and vectorization. And it uses some very nice algorithms to to handle zoom ins etc. The big news for me came when I stumbled across this and realized that it uses template metaprogramming to generate fast C++ code. Bit more googling and what do I find, Haskell bindings for LLVM!!!

I remember that in Lisp one can get access to the code of the functions to manipulate on them. If I can get them in Haskell, it would be great. Generate LLVM code from there, and then run it under a JIT. and after that, send it off to opengl and use shaders to generate nice colors for them....

May be I am getting too ahead of myself. New language, new libraries. May be, I should start from Python first :) But there's no denying that it would make for a very good learning project in Haskell.

Vectorized integer multiplication

Integer operations in vector ISA's rarely get much love (compared to floating point operations), unless it has got something to do with video decode-encode. But I needed something like that for my needs. So I wrote one, and it turns out to be faster than the one in eigen, so it was committed.

Open source developer

Now I am an official opensource developer. Yay!!!!. Feels great to see some stuff from my side being accepted there. Small beginning, I admit. But hopefully, as we go along, I will contribute more and more. BTW, this community is very friendly and responsive.

I wrote this because I wanted to use quaternions and it not being vectorized is obviously a shame. I have also sent a better routine for vectorized integer multiplication. Let's hope it gets in too. The code is only somewhat faster, but hey something is better than nothing.

Good news

Finally, some sanity is restored. Look here for a rant. Lets' hope nvidia drivers won't break this.