A Byte of Coding Issue 390

Yo,

The morning started off with leg day, followed by a coffee and a slice of cheesecake. I expect the afternoon crash to be astronomical.

Anyway, here’s the issue.

PS. I realized right after sending that I forgot the link for one of the articles in the issue yesterday. If you weren’t able to find it, the link is here.

Made possible through generous sponsorship by:

The Performance Impact of C++'s final Keyword

Published: 22 April 2024

Tags: c++, optimization

Benjamin Summerton dives into testing the impact final has on performance in a ray tracing library. 

Some highlights:

• “It all depends on your configuration/platform”

• tested across different cpus and operating systems

• used a number of different scenes with varying number of objects and materials

Deep Diving Into the Erlang Scheduler

Published: 23 April 2024

Tags: erlang

Sapan Diwakar “dissect[s] some of the [Erlang] scheduler's key components and shed[s] light on how it works internally”.

Some highlights:

• “the Erlang VM (BEAM) is capable of spawning several lightweight processes with independent memory space and can communicate easily using message passing”

• “Erlang's asynchronous and non-blocking I/O model allows processes to continue executing other tasks while waiting for I/O operations to complete”

• there are 4 priority levels; low, normal, high, and max and “processes on each priority level get a separate run queue and are scheduled in the normal round-robin fashion”

Single Sign-On: Acronyms Demystified

Published: 28 June 2021

Tags: sponsored, auth, web

WorkOS has published an extensive guide on how one-time passwords work, their benefits, and implementation details.

Some highlights:

• “OTPs come in three different forms, and each form works differently: time-synchronized OTPs, lockstep synchronized OTPs, or transmission-based OTPs”

• OTPs are more secure than static passwords, but can create a frustrating user experience due to potential delays

• Pros and cons for OTPs

A gentler introduction to ReSTIR

Published: 17 December 2023

Tags: algorithms, graphics

Kostas Anagnostou has published an article that takes a more qualitative approach to discussing ReSTIR and doesn’t dive too deeply into the maths behind it.

Some highlights:

• ray tracing shadows for a lot of lights is expensive in terms of both memory and performance

• “Key to ReSTIR is the assumption that we shouldn’t need to process many lights in the scene per pixel but only a small subset of randomly chosen ones, and from this subset only select one, as the ‘most important’ (important in this context means it has the biggest influence on the surface) and representative which we store in a structure called the ‘Reservoir’”

• “At the heart of ReSTIR is a technique called Weighted Reservoir Sampling (WRS)”