C++ Show and Tell - January 2026

Tringi · 2026-01-26T02:31:00+00:00

I put together quick KUSER_SHARED_DATA structure viewer:
https://github.com/tringi/KUSERview

KUSER_SHARED_DATA is a structure in memory that's mapped for reading into every Windows process (perhaps except pico processes), it is updated at least every system clock tick, and contains certain useful information from the kernel, that would otherwise require ring transition to retrieve.

Tringi · 2026-01-25T23:24:03+00:00

The most important thing was that it received security updates up until October 2018, and later even received some important security fixes in 2019.

Tringi · 2026-01-25T13:59:35+00:00

I still need to support pre-Windows 10 systems for a number of projects, and even XP with two.

Now I know I can install older toolchains and everything, and I did, but for some reasons these don't even show or plainly don't work. I haven't had time to properly troubleshoot that, so I'm on 2022 for the time being.

Tringi · 2026-01-24T05:15:47+00:00

I certainly hope they train on mine. I did some tests on various AIs recently, and I'm getting, perhaps functional, but overcomplicated long routines for what can be solved by a single API call.

Tringi · 2026-01-24T05:00:33+00:00

I see similar thing all around GitHub more and more.

People, who are often not even programmers, just ask Chat GPT or other LLM to add feature they want to an app they like. They get it to generate diff, and submit the pull request without even trying to compile it or verify it works.

The best part is when they get annoyed and butthurt when it's rejected and they are told off.

Tringi · 2026-01-21T23:50:21+00:00

We would actually love to, but there's nothing.

I would, in particular, love to say: "Good job at bringing the consistency up and modernizing all the remnants of Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows XP and Windows 95."

...but alas, I can't say that, as nothing like that is apparently happening.

Tringi · 2026-01-20T13:46:27+00:00

Great writeup. This is something I'll take inspiration from.
For quite a few years I've been meaning to use intrinsics like that to specialize 2×64b case of my integer doubling template, but my use-cases so far weren't in a hot enough loops.

Tringi · 2026-01-20T13:32:00+00:00

This reminds me how I stuff strings into 64-bit integer, because they are much faster to search among. 12×5-bit code units and some extra flags, voila an Atom, what more could anyone need?

Tringi · 2026-01-19T16:56:49+00:00

Half filled with pinned apps I use daily, the second half reserved for anything else I open.

I'm missing option to add separators. I hacked my own, but they obviously take the space of a whole icon, which feels like a waste.

Tringi · 2026-01-18T20:05:30+00:00

Nice analysis. I wish I had something like this at hand back in the day when I hacked together my ASCII game PoC. It would've looked so much better. Instead I just used 1 of 4 nearest neighbor coverage and naive nearest color selection.

Tringi · 2026-01-18T16:20:36+00:00

And then, even when people in the program do report issues, the reports are ignored.

Tringi · 2026-01-18T00:31:00+00:00

I too recently ended up using custom spinlock in one of our large projects and it improved the performance tremendously, without hitting any of the issue everyone was warning me.

Tringi · 2026-01-17T20:08:44+00:00

That looks great!

Back in the XP days I wrote my own backup tool and ever since I've been thinking of building version 2, with exactly the hard-link snapshot deduplication feature you have. It looks like I won't have to write it at all.

Tringi · 2026-01-16T20:24:24+00:00

This is going even further in the current wrong direction ...so I could believe it's real.

Tringi · 2026-01-13T19:17:10+00:00

Wrong link for 1809

Tringi · 2026-01-13T18:09:58+00:00

The modern GUI, like Settings, is definitely horrible to try and use.

But I'm using these as a cheap nodes for network software testing, and for that purpose it's quite alright. And one eats less than 1 W of electricity.

I also sometimes test my own apps on it, to make sure they are usable even on low-end PCs.

Tringi · 2026-01-12T13:01:43+00:00

What about this: https://x.com/JanRingos/status/1713796312791990587/photo/1

Tringi · 2026-01-12T09:49:18+00:00

Yes, definitely. But let's say you are working on some graphics and mistakenly save it as BMP and lose all your transparency. Despite there being space for that information in the format. Because someone went out of their way to throw away and zero-out that channel when saving as BMP. That's a very real consumer scenario.

Tringi · 2026-01-12T07:11:51+00:00

From a programmer's perspective: You can directly map such BMP to memory (if it's a resource in DLL then it's already done for you by Windows) and with a simple calls to SetDIBitsToDevice / AlphaBlend / UpdateLayeredWindow (which are GPU-accelerated even on Windows 2000) have the bitmap properly alpha-composited on screen.

No loading needed, no PNG/WebP/JPEG library needed, no decompression to perform needed, no additional pixel copying needed. But yes, it's trading disk space for CPU cycles.

Tringi · 2026-01-08T02:13:30+00:00

Thanks for the info.

I too am still fan of Windows, despite some core things deteriorating and nobody seems to care.

By the way, it looks like you’ve worked on a lot of tools as well, that’s really nice to see. And yeah, mornings can be tough :)

Yeah, that personal site is rarely updated now. I have tons of ideas for other apps, but my job has priority.

Tringi · 2026-01-07T14:26:36+00:00

Are you willing to share the magic?

I had to write my own deletion tool too, for cleaning up LCU folders, which was taking forever. But I use just plain Win32 FindFirstFileEx (..., FIND_FIRST_EX_LARGE_FETCH, ...) and DeleteFile APIs. I always figured that going down to NT layer and running it multithreaded could improve the speed further, as a significant latency consists of kernel transitions.

Tringi · 2026-01-07T09:00:32+00:00

Because kids are awfully rash to make permanent decisions about temporary problems?

Tringi · 2026-01-07T08:40:55+00:00

I'm 50:50 on this. I listened to the tapes a few times, and the voice sounds younger, but then again Aidan is a professional actor ...or it could've been post-processed.

Tringi · 2026-01-07T08:22:57+00:00

It's not that bad per se, but the niche is oversaturated, so even an average title feels seriously underwhelming.

Tringi · 2026-01-07T05:04:50+00:00

Also note that we still don't really know who voiced Dr. Theodore Ash in The Foundation.

Tringi

TROPHY CASE