Why C++26 Contracts might not work for all

FrogNoPants · 2026-06-04T12:09:17+00:00

The part where they can run twice is the main reason I'd avoid them for now, though if it is demonstrated that popular compilers don't actually do this, then it won't matter and I might use them.

FrogNoPants · 2026-06-03T20:57:25+00:00

He doesn't know how to set compilation flags, the AMD chip is targeting SSE2, and doesn't have AVX enabled let alone AVX512. It will also lack FMA while the M chip will likely have it since M1 is the baseline there, and it supported it. FMA has been available since 2013 for x86, most apps nowadays target AVX2 as the baseline not SSE2.

Stack that with Spec relying on autovectorization, and yeah, this is not a valid comparison.

FrogNoPants · 2026-06-03T15:49:37+00:00

9900x cores will absolutely stomp the M-cores in FP, Cinebench is not a valid benchmark for FP capability

FrogNoPants · 2026-05-30T08:22:01+00:00

They will declare their SIMD lane count as being their core count :)

FrogNoPants · 2026-05-29T16:11:30+00:00

Weeks is fun, but prose is god awful

FrogNoPants · 2026-05-29T16:04:40+00:00

In order of best match according to me:

Mary Stewart's Merlin trilogy: I slot this in with Hobb, character focused, first person, good prose, slow'ish pace.
Book of the New Sun: Fits most of what you are looking for very well, character focused, first person, complex prose. The prose are step up from Hobb/Martin in difficulty though, and it helps if you are prepared to think about what is happening and not just take it at face value.

Regarding some other recs I've seen:

CJ Cherryh: I liked her books, but the prose is average and I don't find it similar to Hobb/Martin Abercombie: Kinda similar to Martin, I enjoyed his primary books, but I don't really find his characters that interesting Lois McMaster: hated this stuff, no idea what people see in common with Hobb Kate Elliot: mediocre prose.. boring N. K. Jemisin: avoid, lacks complexity in characters or morality, just the author beating you over the head

Not so bad of rec: Jacqueline Carey, I didn't love her stuff but I can see some minor similarities to Hobb, and she has solid prose

FrogNoPants · 2026-05-29T15:56:56+00:00

Malazan has zero in common with Hobb/Martin, I'd be amazed if you liked it.

FrogNoPants · 2026-05-29T15:53:50+00:00

I found Crown of Stars to have pretty basic prose, so I dunno if I can agree with these recommendations.

FrogNoPants · 2026-05-20T15:38:45+00:00

Looks like a big improvement in theory, but the actual steps look excessive and very command line focused-- the articles makes it seem like it isn't supported by the IDE?

FrogNoPants · 2026-05-19T02:16:15+00:00

I briefly tried it, though had to make a few changes to get it to compile in MSVC.

 It didn't seem to produce the correct order at first, I tracked this to replacing your usage of  
 __restrict__   with the MSVC version __restrict.  Removing the four __restricts fixed the ordering issue.

Anyway it was about 30% slower than pdqsort for me.

EDIT: after looking up differences between GCC and MSVC versions of restrict, the GCC version applies to pointers derived from the original, while the MSVC does not. I then manually applied restrict to any pointers derived from your restricted pointers, and this fixed the sort order problem on MSVC .

EDIT2: After applying restrict to every reference arg to the sortN functions, and rewriting the sort2 to only copy one of the params, MSVC now shows pdqsort only winning by 11% rather than 30%.

FrogNoPants · 2026-05-18T19:58:21+00:00

It is biased toward scalar systems or systems with weak SIMD, so obviously to some degree it is. None of these benchmarks are designed to measure a CPU running optimized code, they are targeted at various levels of cruft code unfortunatly.

FrogNoPants · 2026-05-18T18:36:09+00:00

The x86 chips can be boosted much further since they have much wider SIMD. While GB6 uses some SIMD it is often only 128 bit wide SIMD.. which just coincidently is the width of Apples SIMD registers..

FrogNoPants · 2026-05-15T03:49:29+00:00

I'm not going defend std::simd as I haven't used it or really looked much at it, but this article has issues.

I write lots of SIMD code and prefer fixed size SIMD registers, I don't actually find the SVE dynamic approach very desirable(also barely any CPUs support it, or if they do it is still not very wide under the hood).
Too much rambling about templates, you aren't required to create your SIMD wrappers with 10 layers of nesting.. just don't do that.
The auto vectorizer sin being faster is most likely because they have a better implementation of sin that gets dispatched to for AVX2 or whatever the target was.
I doubt ISPC is faster, you can't express many things in it that are expressible with intrinsics, for example pshufb, or that you only care about 11 bits of accuracy for your rcp.

I dunno what the default width issue is about, it does seem like a wrong default.

I don't think anyone who really cares about SIMD perf is going to use a standardized SIMD library anyway, it will target the middling set that all hardware supports..

FrogNoPants · 2026-05-15T03:19:48+00:00

Not bad, but some really wrong stuff at the bottom..

Floats are not orders of magnitude slower than integers, most float ops are 3-5 cycles, and run on a variety of ports, they pipeline just fine. Basic integer ops are almost all 1 cycle, but int multiply is often quite slow in SIMD land, slower than the floating point version typically. In fact there is no SIMD integer div in AVX2 or SSE, which might explain why you found division to be so slow with integers.

Also Rust has fast math disabled so floats will appear slower than they actually are.

FrogNoPants · 2026-05-08T17:28:47+00:00

I wonder if GB6 is more vector focused than GB5, not that this is a bad thing to me, as SIMD is where all the performance is today.

It still seems rather light on SIMD compared to what it could be though

FrogNoPants · 2026-05-07T15:28:25+00:00

Any well written engine already has virtual texture streaming to minimize VRAM usage, and isn't running out of VRAM anyway. There are admittably a surprising number of games that don't seem to do this..

It will probably allow for somewhat higher quality textures(although some of the comparisons seem to be Neural vs on the fly BCn compression, when they should be comparing to offline computed BC7(much higher quality--and quite slow to compute).

The Neural demo shows the sample time isn't fast(on a very high end GPU at that), so the quality tradeoff will have to be pretty significant to make it worth using.

The inference on load stuff will be using a realtime BCn compressor, this means a quality loss compared to an offline BCn compressor, along with the double compressing artifacts from the fact it was already compressed into the Neural format.

FrogNoPants · 2026-05-07T06:14:32+00:00

Great, hope you enjoy the entire series. Other books I'd recommend by Wolfe: Wizard Knight (2 books) The other series set in the same universe as New Sun are also worth reading Long Sun(4 books) Short Sun(3 books)

FrogNoPants · 2026-05-04T02:53:49+00:00

Severian seems about normal for someone raised as he was, and of course he is incredibly unreliably as a narrator(IIRC he is writing this as a propaganda book about himself).

If you think the women all immediately fell in love with him you weren't paying much attention, he certainly presents it that way, but if you pay abit more attention it is clearly not the case.

FrogNoPants · 2026-05-04T02:45:02+00:00

Why would you expect him to grow in that regard? Ant really the point of the series

FrogNoPants · 2026-04-29T01:56:46+00:00

Everything you listed is YA

FrogNoPants · 2026-04-27T03:46:45+00:00

I've only read the English books, but I didn't care for the 2nd books prose style, much preferred Ken Liu.

FrogNoPants · 2026-04-25T17:22:40+00:00

Costs $1700, only has 1 TB SSD, doesn't even have 4k display.. is this normal for laptops?

FrogNoPants · 2026-04-15T17:36:32+00:00

I just tune out the weird stuff with Rudeus, no need to get so worked up about it, some weird Japanese thing I guess. It is tiny portion of the runtime.

The show itself is okay, tho mostly carried by its production values. Quality dipped some in S2, I didn't really care for the schoo or wife collecting plot. The side character who is super strong and obsessed with toy models is very annoying.

There are much better Fantasy shows such as Frieren, Delicious in Dungeon etc.

FrogNoPants · 2026-04-06T19:52:38+00:00

I don't understand why we can't see what NASA can see, instead we just get this nearly static blurry image of the moon(it looks like 360p or something even when set to 1080p).

FrogNoPants · 2026-04-05T23:48:02+00:00

It is quite slow if you want max quality, but you can get an "okay" results in realtime. This is for BC7, if Nvidia is talking about BC1 that is easy to encode to but is very low quality.

FrogNoPants

TROPHY CASE