Michael Campagnaro sir-pinecone

A quick breakdown of lighting in the restir-meets-surfel branch of my renderer, where I revive some olde surfel experiments, and generously sprinkle ReSTIR on top.

General remarks

Please note that this is all based on work-in-progress experimental software, and represents a single snapshot in development history. Things will certainly change 😛

Due to how I'm capturing this, there's frame-to-frame variability, e.g. different rays being shot, TAA shimmering slightly. Some of the images come from a dedicated visualization pass, and are anti-aliased, and some show internal buffers which are not anti-aliased.

Final images

godbolt Compiler Explorer
- Use this to see the assembly generated for various languages using various compilers. Very useful tool.
uops table
- See instruction latency, throughput, # uops, and port usage across different architectures.
Intel Intrinsics Guide
- A table of all Intel intrinsics
Float Toy
Flat Assembler (FASM)
- My personal choice for writing assembly. Has a cool macro system.
gpfault.net x86-64 assembly tutorials using FASM

On the emergence of interfaces

Interfaces naturally emerge as software gets broken down into parts communicating with one another. The larger and more deliberate structures emerge from a deliberate attempt to organize the development process itself. [fn:Liskov2008] Structure often emerge directly from division of labor: as teams take on independent tasks, interfaces are established betweeen domains they become responsible for. (Conway’s Law)

Software developers are responsible for systems built out of very small atoms while ultimately performing tasks for their users of a much greater magnitude. Dijkstra showed this by computing the ratio between grains of time at the lowest and largest atoms of the system (from say, CPU instructions to a human interaction with the system) The span was already quite large by Dijkstra’s time, of about 10^9. Today this ratio would be at least above 10^12 (see grain ratios)

This large span has to be manage

Links

Note: a lot of programmers talk about UI without mentionning the user even once, as if it was entirely a programming problem. I wonder what we’re leaving off the table when we do that.

https://gist.github.com/vurtun/65977fcff17e413721dbd1191cda719d Vurtun’s notes about UI
https://gist.github.com/vurtun/61b6dbf21ef060bcbbd8d1faa88350d9 Vurtun’s experiments
https://gist.github.com/vurtun/9782db089430167453cff6785b37bb46 other notes by Vurtun
https://gist.github.com/pervognsen/279156b894c5d04ca73df7afc12a37ee Notes about slate by Per Vognsen
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Programming/Slate/
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/UMG/index.html
https://soundcloud.com/podcastcode/6-dont-make-me-write-ui

	#!/usr/bin/env bash

	# Stops the commit if the changes include the word `nocheckin`.

	if which tput >/dev/null 2>&1; then
	ncolors=$(tput colors)
	fi
	if [ -t 1 ] && [ -n "$ncolors" ] && [ "$ncolors" -ge 8 ]; then
	RED="$(tput setaf 1)"
	GREEN="$(tput setaf 2)"

	@echo off
	setlocal enableextensions enabledelayedexpansion

	rem NOTE: Defender may see this file as malware, so you might need to exclude this before things can be disabled.

	rem Modified version of:
	rem https://github.com/ggannann/win10_disable_defender
	rem https://gist.github.com/xezrunner/a7a42dbc1096a40b0c78f09488fe5a2b (as of Jan 2026 this seems to have been deleted or made private)

	rem ============================

	// Branch-free implementation of half-precision (16 bit) floating point
	// Copyright 2006 Mike Acton <macton@gmail.com>
	//
	// Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a
	// copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"),
	// to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation
	// the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense,
	// and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the
	// Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
	//

	// cl.exe xbox_test.c /link setupapi.lib user32.lib

	#include <windows.h>
	#include <setupapi.h>
	#include <dbt.h>
	#include <stdio.h>

	/// interface

	#define XBOX_MAX_CONTROLLERS 16

	#define BYTECODE_INSTRUCTIONS \
	X(BYTECODE_UNINITIALIZED, 0) \
	X(BYTECODE_JUMP_IF_2, _ar) \
	X(BYTECODE_COMPARE_1, _ar) \
	X(BYTECODE_MOVE_A_TO_R, _aR) \

	#define X(NAME, REG_FLAG) NAME,
	enum Bytecode_Instructions {
	BYTECODE_INSTRUCTIONS
	BYTECODE_COUNT,