My Most Important Project Was a Bytecode Interpreter

Re:My Most Important Project Was a Bytecode Interpreter by Jasper_ on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @11:05PM (#12554033)

Tracks I've done and suggested to friends and colleagues as learning experiences:

* Compression (lossless, lossy, image, audio, texture, video)

* Languages (bytecode interpreter, AST interpreter, parser/lexer for a simple language, simple JIT, understanding instruction scheduling)

* DSP programming (writing programs for fast, branchless math)

* Comfort with binary and binary formats (start with packfiles .zip/.tar, move onto reverse engineering simple formats for e.g. games)

* Understanding the difference between RAM and address spaces (e.g. understanding virtual memory, mmap, memory-mapped IO, dynamic linking, the VDSO, page faulting, shared memory)

* Device drivers (easier on Linux, understanding userspace/kernel interaction, ioctls, how hardware and registers work, how to read spec sheets and hardware manuals)

* Graphics (modern software rasterizer that's not scanline-based, understanding 3D and projective transforms, GPU programming and shaders, basic lighting (reflection and illumination) models, what "GPU memory" is, what scanout is, how full scenes are accumulated all along the stack)

I could go heavily into depth for any one of these. Ask me questions if you're interested! They're all fun and I always have more to learn.

Also, the longer you get into any given track, the more you realize they all connect in the end.

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Re:My Most Important Project Was a Bytecode Interpreter by kirang1989 on Thursday September 22, 2016 @03:21AM (#12555086)

This is an awesome list. Thanks!

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Re:My Most Important Project Was a Bytecode Interpreter by Rexxar on Thursday September 22, 2016 @07:47AM (#12556134)

Concerning last point, do you know nice example of non-scanline-based 2D renderers ?

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Re:My Most Important Project Was a Bytecode Interpreter by nadam on Thursday September 22, 2016 @09:43AM (#12556738)

A very informative tutorial on high performance edge-function based rasterization:

https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2013/02/17/optimizing-sw-occlu...

(articles 6, 7, 8, others are not closely related)

As far as I know modern hardware has been non-scanline-based for ages btw.

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Re:My Most Important Project Was a Bytecode Interpreter by Rexxar on Thursday September 22, 2016 @02:39PM (#12559071)

Thanks, looks very interesting. But it seems more 3D-oriented than 2D oriented.

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Re:My Most Important Project Was a Bytecode Interpreter by Jasper_ on Thursday September 22, 2016 @11:11AM (#12557337)

2D renderers? Do you mean rendering 2D shapes? In that case, scanline is probably the most efficient thing you can do, but most renderers are not scanline. The only modern 2D scanline renderer I know of is in the Flash Player code.

For a 3D renderer, I recommend fgiesen's series as linked above, and the older series by Nicolas Capens: http://forum.devmaster.net/t/advanced-rasterization/6145

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Re:My Most Important Project Was a Bytecode Interpreter by Rexxar on Thursday September 22, 2016 @02:31PM (#12559019)

Yes, 2d shapes. I'm writing vector drawing software and I use agg as backend (which use scanlines). In the long term it could be a good think to use or implement a more modern back-end.

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Re:My Most Important Project Was a Bytecode Interpreter by Jasper_ on Thursday September 22, 2016 @03:22PM (#12559470)

Modern, fast 2D rasterization is a really hard problem, one which I'm currently writing a long-form article on. The classic Red Book stencil trick + Loop-Blinn from 2005 is the current state of the art, I think. I'd love to do more research there.

In terms of a software rasterizer, which can often be faster, it's just a matter of elbow grease and engineering. Use SIMD. Implement tons of special cases.

Write a simple polygon plotter to get you started -- just fill a triangle with white with simple edge functions. Then work your way up to arbitrary polygons. And then look into the theory behind antialiasing and such.

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Re:My Most Important Project Was a Bytecode Interpreter by iKlsR on Thursday September 22, 2016 @01:16PM (#12558400)

A blog post detailing resources etc would be heaven.

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Re:My Most Important Project Was a Bytecode Interpreter by dman on Thursday September 22, 2016 @11:52AM (#12557713)

Any pointers / resources for DSP programming?

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Re:My Most Important Project Was a Bytecode Interpreter by Jasper_ on Thursday September 22, 2016 @12:12PM (#12557866)

I learned by reverse engineering DSP code in another platform which was used for obfuscation. I had a chat with a friend and he suggested the TI DSP starter kits. I'm not familiar with any of them, though.

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Re:My Most Important Project Was a Bytecode Interpreter by krivx on Thursday September 22, 2016 @04:44PM (#12560218)

>I learned by reverse engineering DSP code in another platform which was used for obfuscation

Whoa, I want to hear about this. I have a couple of DSP firmware images I've shied away from reverse engineering as I don't know the platforms.

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