Top all-time · #1650
Clean Rinse
Personal blog · blog.mecheye.netgamesprogrammingweb
Clean Rinse is a personal blog at blog.mecheye.net about games, programming and web. Since 2012, 46 different Hacker News readers have linked it 69 times, most often “The Linux Graphics Stack”. The last post was in 2024, but the archive is still widely read.
Most-linked posts?
- The Linux Graphics Stack10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2012-06-22
- Deconstructing the water effect in Super Mario Sunshine5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2019-09-22
- Why are 2D vector graphics so much harder than 3D?4 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2019-05-09
- “DRI”4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2016-01-19
- /2017/09/i-dont-know-who-the-web-audio-api-is-designed-for/3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-11-11
- Deconstructing the Water Effect in Super Mario Sunshine3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-03-03
- I don’t know who the Web Audio API is designed for3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-09-13
- Bytecode3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-12-10
- URG2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-10-12
- Why I’m excited for Vulkan2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-12-13
What Hacker News says?
Audio worklets are a step into the right direction for streaming audio, but for a simple audio-streaming API you don't need the complex node-based architecture of WebAudio, you just need a JS callback which writes samples into an ArrayBuffer. With audio worklets this callbacks runs in a separate audio thread, and with the (deprecated) ScriptProcessNode this callback runs on the main thread. E.g. a "good" web audio A…
Comment linking /2017/09/i-dont-know-who-the-web-audio-api-is-designed-for/
on “WASM 3.0 Completed”Submitted I don’t know who the Web Audio API is designed for as a story · 388 points
HN discussionReminds me of the audio API mess. If you want to stream arbitrary sample data to an output you can either use ScriptProcessorNode (simple API, well supported but deprecated) or AudioWorkletNode (over-engineered API, largely unsupported and experimental). The stall in that case seems caused by the overly ambitious design of the Web Audio API altogether. It's utterly useless for audio processing or synthesis except wh…
Comment linking /2017/09/i-dont-know-who-the-web-audio-api-is-designed-for/
on “Using Firefox for a faster, calmer and distraction-free internet”Submitted Why are 2D vector graphics so much harder than 3D? as a story · 347 points
HN discussionyou may find this interesting: "Why are 2D vector graphics so much harder than 3D?" https://blog.mecheye.net/2019/05/why-is-2d-graphics-is-harde...
Comment linking /2019/05/why-is-2d-graphics-is-harder-than-3d-graphics/
on “Show HN: Lite – A small, fast text editor”Submitted Deconstructing the Water Effect in Super Mario Sunshine as a story · 314 points
HN discussionThanks for the informative link on the technologies that comprise the graphics stack on a typical GNU/Linux system. I see the author also has a great explanation of the different code components that form part of the Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI): http://blog.mecheye.net/2016/01/dri/
Comment linking /2016/01/dri/
on “BSD vs. Linux (2005)”Submitted Introduction to HTML Components as a story · 284 points
HN discussionI would suggest reading (and comprehending) this excellent post for a review as to some of the tire-fire issues of X: http://blog.mecheye.net/2012/06/the-linux-graphics-stack/ DRI2 is an improvement over DRI, of course (which was already about five to eight years behind SOTA for GPUs when it came out ), but it's still a rickety, insecure mess--for one, any application can fire messages at any window in the X environ…
Comment linking /2012/06/the-linux-graphics-stack/
on “BSD vs. Linux (2005)”Submitted The Linux Graphics Stack as a story · 284 points
HN discussionThe examples in this link don't work for me in the latest Firefox or Chromium (or Brave) on Linux. https://blog.mecheye.net/2018/03/deconstructing-the-water-ef... Edit: neither does anything here: https://noclip.website/
Comment linking /2018/03/deconstructing-the-water-effect-in-super-mario-sunshine/
on “Understanding the working of X11 from the ground up (2017)”Submitted Why are 2D vector graphics so much harder than 3D? (2019) as a story · 135 points
HN discussionAuthor here. I stopped working on this a few years ago, so now's as good a time as any for an overly-long, rambly, unedited retrospective. When I started this, I was working on GNOME's window manager full-time, and wanted to learn intricately how X11's drawing model worked, so over the course of a few weeks in a hotel room, I recreated large parts of X11's drawing model in a web browser, fixing artifacts as I went a…
Comment linking /2019/05/why-is-2d-graphics-is-harder-than-3d-graphics/
on “Understanding the working of X11 from the ground up (2017)”Submitted Bytecode as a story · 125 points
HN discussionAuthor here. I had been working on Linux professionally for about 6 years at that point, and got burned out on it. I have a lot of thoughts on the success of Linux as a general-use platform but mostly keep them to myself these days. I still have a deep love for graphics, and have since moved onto working in the games industry, where I am much happier. I also still have a passion for explaining graphics topics. Curre…
Comment linking /2018/03/deconstructing-the-water-effect-in-super-mario-sunshine/
on “Understanding the working of X11 from the ground up (2017)”Submitted URG as a story · 115 points
HN discussionXwayland doesn't need a hardware specific DDX driver, because firstly, many of the features can be implemented by forwarding to the Wayland server, and secondly, the drawing operations (which don't exist in Wayland) have been implemented hardware independently, based on OpenGL, in the GLAMOR backend. https://blog.mecheye.net/2014/04/xwayland/ https://wayland.freedesktop.org/docs/html/ch05.html If hardware vendors do…
Comment linking /2014/04/xwayland/
on “Understanding the working of X11 from the ground up (2017)”Submitted Gnome developer creates new animated image format as a story · 88 points
HN discussion(Author of that article here) It's a bit outdated and honestly needs replacing at this point. Xplain[0] replaces parts of it, and some of my newer blog posts[1][2] replace other parts. I can also answer any questions people have about the stack. [0] http://magcius.github.io/xplain/article/ [1] http://blog.mecheye.net/2014/06/xdg-shell/ [2] http://blog.mecheye.net/2016/01/dri/
Comment linking /2016/01/dri/
on “Intro to Low-Level Graphics on Linux”Submitted Xwayland as a story · 57 points
HN discussionI saw one brief overview here: http://blog.mecheye.net/2012/06/the-linux-graphics-stack/
Comment linking /2012/06/the-linux-graphics-stack/
on “Intro to Low-Level Graphics on Linux”Submitted The Linux Graphics Stack (2012) as a story · 45 points
HN discussionI'm trying: http://blog.mecheye.net/2014/06/xdg-shell/ Really, a big part of Wayland is that there isn't much there. It's not a ridiculously complicated system to explain with lots of extensions, you're just having clients pass image files around and get streams of messages for input. The easiest way to get a feel for the system is to use the built-in protocol dumper: $ WAYLAND_DEBUG=client weston-terminal ... or so…
Comment linking /2014/06/xdg-shell/
on “XPlain – Explaining X11 for the rest of us”Submitted Why I’m excited for Vulkan as a story · 28 points
HN discussionI really enjoy reading about some of the techniques the developers use to get the most out of the hardware. Here are some of my favorites from recent memory: https://medium.com/@gordonnl/wind-waker-graphics-analysis-a0... https://blog.mecheye.net/2018/03/deconstructing-the-water-ef... https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2014/03/15/pixel-processing-pro...
Comment linking /2018/03/deconstructing-the-water-effect-in-super-mario-sunshine/
on “Nintendo has reportedly suffered a significant legacy console leak”Submitted Why Package Managers Are Not My Ideal Software Distribution Mechanism as a story · 18 points
HN discussionSee this blog, it explains it pretty well imho: https://blog.mecheye.net/2019/05/why-is-2d-graphics-is-harde... And: historically they've been computed mostly on CPU, but I think it's time for that to change.
Comment linking /2019/05/why-is-2d-graphics-is-harder-than-3d-graphics/
on “Fast 2D Rendering on GPU”Submitted The Linux Graphics Stack (2012) as a story · 12 points
HN discussionOthers have spoken to this, but as a general introduction I highly recommend Jasper's post "Why are 2D vector graphics so much harder than 3D?" In short, no, it's not a solved problem. Also, I see a lot of variations of this question, but I should state this more clearly. There's been accelerated graphics in one form or another for a long time, but what I'm doing is a completely different type of thing. In my world,…
Comment linking /2019/05/why-is-2d-graphics-is-harder-than-3d-graphics/
on “Fast 2D Rendering on GPU”Submitted The Linux Graphics Stack as a story · 9 points
HN discussion
