I’ve long been frustrated with wordpress as the way I post content on my blog: It is bloated and slow to load pages. Requires an SQL server for content which is mostly static. I find the editor unintuitive. Code samples never quite displayed correctly. I’ve been looking at Hugo for a while now as I love the idea of static site generator, but everytime in the past I tried to switch to it in the past but I was frustrated by the export to hugo plugin for wordpress being broken.

I’ve been continuing my foray into Rust, and one thing I’ve been interested in is global allocators - Rust’s builtin support for switching the allocator used by an application. One thing I’ve been wanting to try for a while is to see if a bump allocator used in conjunction with a short running application could result in performance gains. I couldn’t find while perusing crates.io any crate that added a global allocator that just bumps, so I’ve written my own - bump_alloc.

2018 has been a very busy year for me personally, and I thought for the sake of my own memory of the events I’d do a review of the things I’ve managed to achieve this year. Vulkan 1.1 / SPIR-V 1.3 & Subgroup Operations The single biggest item that I shipped this year was adding subgroup operations to Vulkan 1.1 and SPIR-V 1.3. It took just under two years of wrangling with all the hardware vendors to get a set of functionality that we could expose on all Vulkan 1.

So I’ve been playing around with Rust in my spare time for a few months now, and have been doing a lot of stuff that bridges C/C++ and Rust content. And one thing that has always bugged me is that I can use a super awesome allocator like jemalloc in Rust, but that the allocations being done via C++ were not being routed into this allocator. So as a tiny baby step into the Rust community, I’ve released my first crate cpp_new.

After 11 years since my first internship, and 9 years full time, I’m leaving Codeplay to join AMD. A Brief History of Codeplay and I I was a nineteen year old ned when I started my first internship at Codeplay, and was given the code-monkey job of hand optimizing shaders for an OpenGL ES 2.0 shader compiler, so that Codeplay’s compiler engineers could prove the capability of the compiler. Slated to take 10 weeks, I finished the task in 2 weeks and to stave off boredom in the remaining 8 weeks I ended up proving 100% code coverage of the compiler and writing a test generator to break it.