"A Buffer Overflow is a bug class in a program typically written in a memory unsafe language like C or C++. Buffer Overflow bugs from user-input can often allow someone to overwrite some data in memory they weren't supposed to. Before we dive into how to exploit Buffer Overflow bugs, we will do a quick introduction to Assembly."

Programming a basic Lisp interpreter in Python.

aka Some Strategies For Fast Lexical Analysis when Parsing Programming Languages, by Sean Barrett

"It's not necessary to be familiar with the other algorithms for expression parsing in order to understand precedence climbing. In fact, I think that precedence climbing is the simplest of them all. To explain it, I want to first present what the algorithm is trying to achieve. After this, I will explain how it does this, and finally will present a fully functional implementation in Python."

"Little Lisp is an interpreter that supports function invocation, lambdas, lets, ifs, numbers, strings, a few library functions, and lists. I wrote it for a lightning talk at the Recurse Center to show how easy it is to write an interpreter. The code is 116 lines of JavaScript. I will explain how it works." There is also a video version of this article: https://youtu.be/hqnTvuvXPCc

Testing whether a point is inside a polygon is a basic operation in computer graphics. Graphics Gems presents an algorithm for testing points against convex polygons (Badouel 1990). This Gem provides algorithms which are from 1.6 to 9 or more times faster for convex polygons. It also presents algorithms for testing non-convex polygons and discusses the advantages and drawbacks of each. Faster, more memory intensive algorithms are also presented, along with an O(log n) algorithm for convex polygons. Code is included for the algorithms discussed.

Various methods to convert a point on a unit square to a point on a unit disc.

Advice about programming effectively by solving the problems you actually have.

Discusses some shortcomings frequently found in Entity Component System implementations and suggests solutions.

"Requirements: This tutorial assumes you know C++, but no previous compiler experience is necessary. [...] Here we run through the implementation of a simple language [...]This tutorial will get you up and running fast and show a concrete example of something that uses LLVM to generate code."

"A Buffer Overflow is a bug class in a program typically written in a memory unsafe language like C or C++. Buffer Overflow bugs from user-input can often allow someone to overwrite some data in memory they weren't supposed to. Before we dive into how to exploit Buffer Overflow bugs, we will do a quick introduction to Assembly."

"It's not necessary to be familiar with the other algorithms for expression parsing in order to understand precedence climbing. In fact, I think that precedence climbing is the simplest of them all. To explain it, I want to first present what the algorithm is trying to achieve. After this, I will explain how it does this, and finally will present a fully functional implementation in Python."

"Little Lisp is an interpreter that supports function invocation, lambdas, lets, ifs, numbers, strings, a few library functions, and lists. I wrote it for a lightning talk at the Recurse Center to show how easy it is to write an interpreter. The code is 116 lines of JavaScript. I will explain how it works." There is also a video version of this article: https://youtu.be/hqnTvuvXPCc

Discusses some shortcomings frequently found in Entity Component System implementations and suggests solutions.

A complete taxonomy of plane-filling (a.k.a space-filling) curves. E.g. Hilbert curve, Peano curve, Morton curve, etc...

Abstract: "Programming language ‘‘paradigms’’ are a moribund and tedious legacy of a bygone age. Modern language designers pay them no respect, so why do our courses slavishly adhere to them? This paper argues that we should abandon this method of teaching languages, offers an alternative, reconciles an important split in programming language education, and describes a textbook that explores these matters."

From the introduction: "Many people would regard this as being two books in one. One book is an introduction to programming, teaching you basic concepts of organizing data and the programs that operate over them, ending in the investigation of universally useful algorithms. The other book is an introduction to programming languages: a study, from one level up, of the media by which we structure these data and programs. Obviously, these are not unrelated topics. We learn programming through one or more languages, and the programs we write then become natural subjects of study to understand languages at large. Nevertheless, these are considered sufficiently different topics that they are approached separately. This is how we approached them, too." by Shriram Krishnamurthi, Benjamin S. Lerner, Joe Gibbs Politz

Content from the book "C Programming FAQs: Frequently Asked Questions"

A complete taxonomy of plane-filling (a.k.a space-filling) curves. E.g. Hilbert curve, Peano curve, Morton curve, etc...

Collection of free programming books

Abstract: "Programming language ‘‘paradigms’’ are a moribund and tedious legacy of a bygone age. Modern language designers pay them no respect, so why do our courses slavishly adhere to them? This paper argues that we should abandon this method of teaching languages, offers an alternative, reconciles an important split in programming language education, and describes a textbook that explores these matters."

From the introduction: "Many people would regard this as being two books in one. One book is an introduction to programming, teaching you basic concepts of organizing data and the programs that operate over them, ending in the investigation of universally useful algorithms. The other book is an introduction to programming languages: a study, from one level up, of the media by which we structure these data and programs. Obviously, these are not unrelated topics. We learn programming through one or more languages, and the programs we write then become natural subjects of study to understand languages at large. Nevertheless, these are considered sufficiently different topics that they are approached separately. This is how we approached them, too." by Shriram Krishnamurthi, Benjamin S. Lerner, Joe Gibbs Politz

"This text is written for those who only make first steps in programming. The main idea is to show, step by step, how to make a game à la Wolfenstein 3D. Attention, I am not going to compete with Carmack, he is a genius and his code is stunning. I aim a different goal: I'm using the huge computing power of modern computers to allow my students to create fun projects in very short time (typically few days), without getting stuck in the optimization nightmare."

"There are plenty of raytracing articles on the web; however the problem is that almost all of them show finished software that can be quite difficult to understand. Take, for example, the very famous businness card ray tracer challenge. It produces very impressive programs, but it's very difficult to understand how this works. Rather than showing that I can do renders, I want to tell you in detail how you can do it by yourself."

"This tutorial attempts to get you started developing with the Win32 API as quickly and clearly as possible."

Describes a range of techniques for approximating/optimizing elementary math functions.

Abstract: We introduce a low-distortion map between triangle and square. This mapping yields an area-preserving parameterization that can be used for sampling random points with a uniform density in arbitrary triangles. This parameterization presents two advantages compared to the square-root parameterization typically used for triangle sampling. First, it has lower distortions and better preserves the blue noise properties of the input samples. Second, its computation relies only on arithmetic operations(+, *), which makes it faster to evaluate.

With a classical unidirectional path tracer, we'll have some scenes where it is difficult to connect to the light source, and therefore many of our computed samples will be wasted. What if we would start not only one light path from the camera, but one also from the light source, and connect the two together? It turns out that we get a much more robust technique that can render a variety of "packed" scenes with lots of occlusions with ease.

A variety of mappings between a sphere and a disc and between a disc and a square, as well as combinations of both, are used in computer graphics applications, resulting in mappings between spheres and squares. Many options exist for each type of mapping; to pick the right methods for a given application requires knowledge about the nature and magnitude of mapping distortions. This paper provides an overview of forward and inverse mappings between a unit sphere, a unit disc, and a unit square. Quality measurements relevant for computer graphics applications are derived from tools used in the field of map projection, and a comparative analysis of the mapping methods is given.

Computing global illumination using the many-lights approach is expensive, this algorithm presents a method ("exploration") for reducing the amount of lights to be sampled.

Metropolis Light Transport is a powerful technique that can outperform the convergence speed of Bidirectional Path Tracing on most difficult scenes (what makes a scene difficult is a story on its own). It promises optimal importance sampling "along multiple steps" in the stationary distribution of the Markov chain.

Abstract: JavaScript Object Notation or JSON is aubiquitous data exchange format on the Web. Ingesting JSON documents can become a performance bottleneck due to the sheer volume of data. We are thus motivated to make JSON parsing as fast as possible. Despite the maturity of the problem of JSON parsing, we show that substantial speedups are possible. We present the first standard-compliant JSON parser to process gigabytes of data per second on a single core, using commodity processors.

Describes the Photon Mapping solution to light transport.

A paper exploring measurement bias in program profiling. From the abstract: "Changing a seemingly innocuous aspect of an experimental setup can cause a systems researcher to draw wrong conclusions from an experiment...Our results demonstrate that measurement bias is significant and commonplace in computer system evaluation."

Abstract: The Hammersley and Halton point sets, two well known low discrepancy sequences, have been used for quasi-Monte Carlo integration in previous research. A deterministic formula generates a uniformly distributed and stochastic-looking sampling pattern, at low computational cost. The Halton point set is also useful for incremental sampling. In this paper, we discuss detailed implementation issues and our experience of choosing suitable bases of the point sets, not just on the 2D plane,but also on a spherical surface. The sampling scheme is also applied to ray tracing, with a significant improvement in error.

A solution to the global illumination problem by sampling from many lights. Stochastic Lightcuts is an improvement on the earlier Lightcuts algorithm. Presentation at HPG 2019.

Describes improvements to Photon Mapping, called Progressive Photon Mapping, Stochastic Photon Mapping, and their combination.

"This text is written for those who only make first steps in programming. The main idea is to show, step by step, how to make a game à la Wolfenstein 3D. Attention, I am not going to compete with Carmack, he is a genius and his code is stunning. I aim a different goal: I'm using the huge computing power of modern computers to allow my students to create fun projects in very short time (typically few days), without getting stuck in the optimization nightmare."

"There are plenty of raytracing articles on the web; however the problem is that almost all of them show finished software that can be quite difficult to understand. Take, for example, the very famous businness card ray tracer challenge. It produces very impressive programs, but it's very difficult to understand how this works. Rather than showing that I can do renders, I want to tell you in detail how you can do it by yourself."

"This repo contains samples that demonstrate the API used in Windows classic desktop applications. These samples demonstrate the functionality and programming model for Windows and Windows Server. This repo contains Visual Studio solution (SLN) files for each sample, along with the source files, assets, resources, and metadata needed to compile and run the sample. For more info about the programming models, platforms, languages, and APIs demonstrated in these samples, check out the documentation on the Windows Dev Center."

Discussion and explanation of lights, shadows and the functions for modelling them.

Content from the book "C Programming FAQs: Frequently Asked Questions"

A complete taxonomy of plane-filling (a.k.a space-filling) curves. E.g. Hilbert curve, Peano curve, Morton curve, etc...

Abstract: "Programming language ‘‘paradigms’’ are a moribund and tedious legacy of a bygone age. Modern language designers pay them no respect, so why do our courses slavishly adhere to them? This paper argues that we should abandon this method of teaching languages, offers an alternative, reconciles an important split in programming language education, and describes a textbook that explores these matters."

From the introduction: "Many people would regard this as being two books in one. One book is an introduction to programming, teaching you basic concepts of organizing data and the programs that operate over them, ending in the investigation of universally useful algorithms. The other book is an introduction to programming languages: a study, from one level up, of the media by which we structure these data and programs. Obviously, these are not unrelated topics. We learn programming through one or more languages, and the programs we write then become natural subjects of study to understand languages at large. Nevertheless, these are considered sufficiently different topics that they are approached separately. This is how we approached them, too." by Shriram Krishnamurthi, Benjamin S. Lerner, Joe Gibbs Politz

"This tutorial attempts to get you started developing with the Win32 API as quickly and clearly as possible."

A table holding most common x86/x64 SIMD with useful diagrams (infer at a glance what it does).

A YouTube series teaching the fundamentals of 3D rendering, with the focus on software rendering.

Math videos from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology math professor Jeffrey Chasnov.

A course on photorealistic rendering, ray tracing and global illumination at the TU Wien. The entire course is now available here on YouTube!

Niklas Gray of Our Machinery walks through the design failings of their previous game engines (Bitsquid and Stingray) and how they applied those lessons to their new engine. Topics include frameworks, data definition, and UI.

Implementing a physically based shading model without locking yourself in

Photon mapping provides a practical way of efficiently simulating global illumination including interreflections, caustics, color bleeding, participating media and subsurface scattering in scenes with complicated geometry and advanced material models. This class will provide the insight necessary to efficiently implement and use photon mapping to simulate global illumination in complex scenes. The presentation will briefly cover the fundamentals of photon mapping including efficient techniques and datastructures for managing large numbers of rays and photons. In addition, we will describe how to integrate the information from the photon maps in shading algorithms to render global illumination.

With a classical unidirectional path tracer, we'll have some scenes where it is difficult to connect to the light source, and therefore many of our computed samples will be wasted. What if we would start not only one light path from the camera, but one also from the light source, and connect the two together? It turns out that we get a much more robust technique that can render a variety of "packed" scenes with lots of occlusions with ease.

Daniel Shiffman teaches creative coding. Mostly using high level languages but certainly worth a peek or two.

"Little Lisp is an interpreter that supports function invocation, lambdas, lets, ifs, numbers, strings, a few library functions, and lists. I wrote it for a lightning talk at the Recurse Center to show how easy it is to write an interpreter. The code is 116 lines of JavaScript. I will explain how it works." There is also a video version of this article: https://youtu.be/hqnTvuvXPCc

A short video listing the tricks developers can use to fit a game into a small NES cartridge.

Computing global illumination using the many-lights approach is expensive, this algorithm presents a method ("exploration") for reducing the amount of lights to be sampled.

Metropolis Light Transport is a powerful technique that can outperform the convergence speed of Bidirectional Path Tracing on most difficult scenes (what makes a scene difficult is a story on its own). It promises optimal importance sampling "along multiple steps" in the stationary distribution of the Markov chain.

A description of Path Tracing, a ray tracing solution to the rendering equation, and one of its traditional optimizations, Next Event Estimation.

Describes the Photon Mapping solution to light transport.

Lighting usually only changes smoothly over a surface, Irradiance Caching is a classic approach to reduce the computational cost by only computing lighting at points where it changes quickly.

Lecture describing how to solve the radiosity equations used to compuse diffuse global illumination.

[...] how to combine glossy reflection ray tracing with diffuse ray-traced irradiance field probes. This creates a complete dynamic global illumination solution that scales across all DXR GPUs and minimizes light leaking without requiring manual per-probe or lightmap work by artists.

Squishy is a new 64k intro compressor used by top groups in 7 productions at revision 2019, 3 of them meteorik-nominated 64k intros, and it has recently been released in the wild. This talk start by an intro to 64k intros and executable compression, and will continue with a deep-dive into squishy's internals, what makes it special, and some tips on how you can start making your own executable compressors.

A solution to the global illumination problem by sampling from many lights. Stochastic Lightcuts is an improvement on the earlier Lightcuts algorithm. Presentation at HPG 2019.

Describes improvements to Photon Mapping, called Progressive Photon Mapping, Stochastic Photon Mapping, and their combination.

Concentric mapping is a commonly used method for mapping points on a unit square to a unit disc. These are some code samples.