Better Software Conference

You kept making the software worse.

@NinadSachania The painting "Kerkplein in de Sneeuw" by Johannes Franciscus Spohler.

@BetterSoftwareC Wallpaper?

Merry Christmas, everyone! And a Happy... New Year!

The final talk of BSC 2025, by @DemetriSpanos, Foliated Distance Fields: Scalable Rendering of Glyphs with Gradients is out! Enjoy. youtu.be/3AGeLuO5WdY

For those interested in a written form of my talk at BSC to skim or search through, I have prepared a lengthy article with lots of content; diagrams, videos, tables, and Desmos graphs that mirrors the information of my talk, it's available on my website: wassimulator.com/blog/programmi…

The reason we need better software isn’t just to "shave milliseconds". When a simple build takes minutes, the cost of iteration rewires your brain. You stop exploring ideas and start avoiding them. And that’s fatal, because iteration is the essence of invention. Slow tools don’t just waste time. They reshape thought, teaching you to fear the very process that drives progress. Bad software doesn’t kill productivity. It strangles imagination.

Existing search tools on Windows suck. Even with an SSD, it’s painfully slow. So I built a prototype of Nowgrep. It bypasses most of the slow Windows nonsense, and just parses the raw NTFS. On an SSD, this ends up faster than ripgrep, even on a cached run (Nowgrep bypasses most Software caching). Demo: Filtering 2 million and searching ~270K files under C:/ for the substring "Hello". I have many ideas to make these an even smoother experience. Let me know if this is interesting, and I might pursue it further to make a shippable product with good UX.

.@azmreece's talk it out! A deep, technical look into concrete methods for reducing layers of indirection, memory accesses, and showing his Xar data-structure: A simple, pointer-stable, CPU-friendly, growable array. youtu.be/i-h95QIGchY

Cameron Reikes (aka. creikey) did the most humorous talk of the conference, on deep learning and computer vision. It's now out! Enjoy. youtu.be/yxkUvXs-hoQ

.@TahaTorabpour's demo of, and Q&A on the new immediate mode GUI library he's been working on is out! youtu.be/UULQyRKc6sM

For all the people who thought my first talk at @BetterSoftwareC was spicy, id like to inform you that it was not my spicy talk. This was my spicy talk: youtu.be/SbeNRICgzTA

@EskilSteenberg's RANT is out! He's had it with the security orthodoxy. youtu.be/SbeNRICgzTA

Parser generators tend to produce very bad error messages, and by the time you put in enough of your own code to generate actual good error messages, you might as well have just written the parser yourself, it's simpler and faster. The "ambiguity" issue, that people claim recursive descent parsers have, is a made-up issue. There is no actual ambiguity, as your code will pick one preferred parse over another. This is just the same thing as operator precedence, but for general syntax, and it is what your users want. Parser generators have the same "ambiguity" issue, you just solve it by tweaking numbers or refactoring the grammar slightly, instead of writing code. (See the classic "if ... if ... else" construction... if you insist there's ambiguity of some kind, there's no answer, so duh, you pick a preferred parse.) In short almost all discussion around these issues is a dumb waste of time and everyone is fired.

.@SamHSmith2's talk is out! Come delve into AST-free compilation and optimizing with sea of nodes! youtu.be/NxiKlnUtyio

.@SanderSkjegstad's talk is out! An entertaining run-through of his algorithm for dynamic phase alignment. youtu.be/JNCVj_RtdZw

.@TedBendixson's talk is out! It's the kick in the ass you need. youtu.be/Ca53JTohdN4

.@Wassimulator's talk is out! Enjoy his distilled knowledge on programming vehicles for games. youtu.be/MrIAw980iYg