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Resource efficient Thread Pools with Zig

Published: 12 September 2021
Tags: zig

A thread pool (or replicated workers or worker-crew model) "is just a group of threads that work can be dispatched to".The advantages of the pool over single threads is you save on the startup/closing costs of individual threads. In this informative article, Protty documents their nontrivial journey of implementing a thread pool for Zig's async I/O driver.

Introducing Coalton: How to Have Our (Typed) Cake and (Safely) Eat It Too, in Common Lisp

Published: 10 September 2021
Tags: coalton, common lisp

Quantum computing is currently in the very early stages of development, with exciting news coming out every couple of months regarding one group achieving quantum supremacy over another. But that's mostly hardware related. What's the current state of the software? Robert Smith, Elias Lawson-Fox, and Cole Scott authored this article to introduce Coalton, "a statically typed functional programming language built with Common Lisp".

Ray casting in 2D game engines

Published: 12 September 2021
Tags: math

Ray tracing is one of the goto projects for beginners learning programming or advanced programmers learning another language, because it's visually entertaining and full of fun challenges. Sebastian Szczepański's aesthetically beautiful article (check out the interactive demos) dives deeply into the maths behind 2D ray tracing, pairing dense blocks of equations with visually pleasing interactions.