Via that same Hacker News piece that generated “Image rotation by shifting pixels” (2021-11-13): Any angular rotation can be expressed as the sum of three shear transformations. Shear right, then down, then right again; the result is an angular rotation!

TLDR: std::mt19937 is half the speed of a good PRNG (and 500 times slower to seed, for what that’s worth). These days I copy-and-paste xoshiro256ss.h when I need random numbers for a project.

This story comes from the libc++ review implementing P1989 “Range constructor for std::string_view 2: Constrain Harder” (Corentin Jabot, March 2021). That paper made std::string_view implicitly convertible-from basically any contiguous range of characters. Which, to be clear, is probably a good thing. But it turned up a really interesting interaction in libc++’s filesystem::path. Somehow, enabling this constructor template in the <string_view> header caused libc++’s filesystem::path to stop being a range!

Several readers have responded to my recent post “Three reasons to pass std::string_view by value” (2021-11-09), pointing out that (while everything I said is true of the Itanium x86-64 ABI used on Linux and Mac) unfortunately Microsoft’s x86-64 ABI does not pass std::string_view in registers, but instead passes it by “hidden pointer,” so that at the machine level, you get basically the same codegen as if you had been passing by reference all along. Except that actually you’re passing a copy by reference, so you get one extra 16-byte copy in addition to all the other stack traffic MSVC is doing.

This is a big problem baked into Microsoft’s x86-64 ABI, and nerfs a lot of the performance benefits mentioned in my post. However, my advice remains the same: Even if your primary platform today is Windows, you should habitually pass std::string_view by value!

At CppCon this year, Ben Deane’s nametag featured a cryptic crossword clue: Bird chewing a pencil (7). That got us talking about crosswords, which reminded me that a few months earlier I’d learned of Vermont poet Holly Painter, who has a book coming out next year titled At last, we listen closely: cryptic crossword poems. The publisher’s blurb explains:

Via Hacker News: You may know that you can reverse a string by first reversing the order of the words in the string, then reversing the characters in each word. (So hello world becomes world hello, and then we recursively reverse each word to get dlrow olleh.) Well, it turns out you can do the same kind of thing in two dimensions: to rotate an image by 90 degrees, you can just rotate the order of the quadrants, and then recursively rotate each quadrant.

Many years ago, someone taught me a party game suitable for four to a-whole-bunch-of players. The game is called Contact. It’s a word game. It’s also a “one versus many” game in the vein of Zendo and Elon Musk’s iPod Submarine. Unlike those games, this one requires no physical components at all. Like them, it’s a lot of fun. Here’s how to play.

It is idiomatic to pass std::string_view by value. Let’s see why.

I just finished reading William A. Granville’s The Fourth Dimension and the Bible (1922). It’s quite mind-bending! I don’t mean the Biblical stuff (which is all quite a stretch), but specifically Granville’s mathematical examples, several of which were completely new to me.

I contributed some puzzles to the online venue for CppCon 2021. Some of my contributions were just C++ Pub Quiz questions recycled from 2019; but I also contributed a set of logic puzzles that I think are fairly novel. I’m going to call this type of puzzle “overload arrangement.”

Last night I emceed Game 2 of CppCon 2021’s “C++ Pub Quiz.” This time, five teams participated, and the results were again pretty close: In first place, the ironically named Team Dead Weight with 29.5 points, followed by decltype([](){}) at 28 and the Metaprogrammers at 27. Thanks also to the Leftovers and the Abominable Types.

CppCon 2021 is half over already. Tonight I emceed the first game of the third annual CppCon “C++ Pub Quiz.” Herb Sutter offered opening remarks, and then joined one of our seven teams for a few rounds of play. What is C++ Pub Quiz, you ask? It’s a straightforward trivia night — five rounds, ten questions per round, write down your team’s answers on a sheet of paper and turn it in at the end of the round. High score after five rounds wins the game.

Seven teams participated in this year’s Pub Quiz. The winning team of the night was Team BYOB, with a score of 33 points, just edging out Team Hufflepuff at 32. Third place went to Rotate! That’s A with 30 points. Thanks also to Symbol Not Found; Unit Tested; the Reference ₩rappers a.k.a. UB Unicorns; and Flying Blind.

Today (in two different contexts) I saw people reopening namespace std in order to introduce a specialization of a standard template. For example:

C++20 introduces new expression-rewriting rules for comparison operators, such that the compiler can rewrite a < b as either (a <=> b) < 0 or 0 < (b <=> a), and a != b as either !(a == b) or !(b == a). Today, someone asked whether these new rules decrease the attractiveness of the hidden friend idiom for overloaded operators — at least for operator<=>, should we just declare it as a member function? The answer is no. Observe (Godbolt):

Last night Alexandre Muñiz gave a Celebration of Mind talk titled “How to Roll Two Dice.” If you want to roll 2d6, you can do it either the boring way (by rolling two ordinary d6s) or the interesting way — by rolling two distinct d6s, one labeled 1-2-2-3-3-4 and the other labeled 1-3-4-5-6-8. These Sicherman dice (invented by George Sicherman and first reported by Martin Gardner in 1978) produce the same distribution of 36 possible results as the ordinary 2d6:

CppCon 2021 starts in just a few days! As in 2019 and 2020, CppCon 2021 will have a “Back to Basics” track. The Back to Basics track’s mission (in phrasing newly refined for 2021) is: Top trainers clearly explain all the essential topics of modern C++.

The other day I received a pre-release review copy of Fedor Pikus’s new book, The Art of Writing Efficient Programs (Packt Publishing, 2021). Here’s my review of it. TLDR: it’s very good! I don’t say that about just any book; and for a review copy from Packt, this book definitely exceeded my expectations.

In my C++ training classes, I often explain the meaning of =delete as

The library author is saying, “I know what you’re trying to do, and what you’re trying to do is wrong.”

Next week, October 18 through 24, the Gathering 4 Gardner is hosting a week-long Celebration of Mind, featuring three brief presentations per day, every day. The speaker lineup has just been announced — and with a nicer HTML layout than last time, too! The new layout makes this very short summary lineup less necessary than last time, but heck, it’s content.

I was recently thinking about one of the DOS shareware games of my youth: Evasive Maneuvers (Colin Buckley and Chris Blackwell, 1994). It’s a really polished and addictive VGA side-scroller in which you pilot a little Imperial-Shuttle-ish spacecraft through obstacle-strewn levels, trying to keep up with the implacable scrolling of the screen (á là Flappy Bird (2013)) while shooting and dropping bombs to eliminate hazards and to keep your ship fueled by exploding rooftop fuel tanks. It’s a clone/homage to Scramble (Konami, 1981), which I’ve personally never played but which has clearly spawned a lot of imitators.