Patrick Walton

@pcwalton

Research engineer at Mozilla

San Francisco, CA
Joined November 2009

Media

  1. Jan 24

    Flowchart for when you should consider using a macro in Rust

  2. Jan 8

    Here's an example of texturing a piece of cloth with an ~600kB SVG instead of a raster image. Looks nice when zoomed in.

    Show this thread
  3. Jan 6

    A work-in-progress implementation of vector textures via sparse virtual texturing. This allows an SVG to be used as a texture for any mesh at effectively infinite resolution without using much GPU memory.

    Show this thread
  4. 18 Dec 2019

    Parallel rustc is very exciting! (Thanks to for making these measurements!) See:

    Show this thread
  5. 15 Dec 2019

    Go home Google Maps typography, you're drunk

    Show this thread
  6. 19 Nov 2019

    Here’s a bound for single-pixel error for a cached image vs. an SVG rendered via analytic AA. If you offset the cached texture by 0.5 pixels in each direction, you could end up with a pixel 75% filled when it should be 0%. (Dunno if this makes any sense…hard to explain)

    Show this thread
  7. 11 Nov 2019

    I’m not sure whether this code to check (major < 2 || (major == 2 && minor <= 1)) is clever or extremely cursed

  8. 11 Nov 2019

    Current status: Lies, damn lies, and GLX documentation.

  9. 1 Nov 2019

    Found this very cursed code googling for info on msvcrt. Who needs libc anyway? your way to victory!

  10. 28 Oct 2019

    From DX12 raytracing (via ). Sounds like a big improvement: the fixed-function-ness of the raytracing API really bugged me.

    Show this thread
  11. 10 Oct 2019

    Always fun to go back and look at comments from the orange site circa 2016

  12. 1 Oct 2019
  13. 29 Sep 2019

    The biggest problem with Direct3D is that information on the API is ungooglable because it’s lost in a sea of video game tech support noise

  14. 27 Sep 2019
    Replying to

    Sorry, the term “cat snake” is reserved for this

  15. 26 Sep 2019
    Replying to and

    e.g. what I came up with is this. A quick Google search suggests that most people abuse the sign function instead. Which is faster? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

  16. 24 Sep 2019
    Replying to and

    Older versions of the GCC inline asm docs allude to programs doing this.

  17. 23 Sep 2019
    Replying to

    Obviously dated material but Retro Game Mechanics Explained has some of the best material on basic linear algebra for graphics I’ve seen. For example:

  18. 21 Sep 2019

    I always associate RMS with memories of reading this as a kid exploring Unix man pages and being extremely confused.

  19. 17 Sep 2019
    Replying to and

    My concern isn’t that raytracing is hard to use, it’s that it increases the surface area of the Vulkan API by 50% or more for something not many people are using right now.

  20. 17 Sep 2019

    I confess I’m pretty ignorant about real time raytracing hardware, but this comment captures my general unease with the direction it’s going (source: )

Loading seems to be taking a while.

Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.

    You may also like

    ·