» Benefiting from deliberately failing linkage

» December 26, 2023 | cpp development english | Adrian Kummerländer

Realizing that I have not written anything here for two years lets just start writing again1: Compilation times for template-heavy C++ codebases such as the one at the center of my daily life can be a real pain. This mostly got worse since I started to really get my hands dirty in its depths during the extensive refactoring towards SIMD and GPU support2. The current sad high point in compilation times was reached when compiling the first GPU-enabled simulation cases: More than 100 seconds for a single compile on my not too shabby system. This article will detail how I significantly reduced this on the build system level while gaining useful features. ↪

» Reproducible development environment for Teensy

» October 11, 2021 | cpp development english nix | Adrian Kummerländer

So for a change of scenery I recently started to mess around with microcontrollers again. Since the last time that I had any real contact with this area was probably around a decade ago — programming an ASURO robot — I started basically from scratch. Driven by the goal of building and programming a fancy mechanical keyboard (as it seems to be the trendy thing to do) I chose the Arduino-compatible Teensy 4.0 board. While I appreciate the rich and accessible software ecosystem for this platform, I don't really want to use some special IDE, applying amongst other things1 weird non-standard preprocessing to my code. In this vein it would also be nice to use my accustomed Nix-based toolchain which leads me to this article. ↪

» Noise and Ray Marching

» September 26, 2021 | development english math | Adrian Kummerländer

LiterateLB's volumetric visualization functionality relies on a simple ray marching implementation to sample both the 3D textures produced by the simulation side of things and the signed distance functions that describe the obstacle geometry. While this produces surprisingly nice looking results in many cases, some artifacts of the visualization algorithm are visible depending on the viewport and sample values. Extending the ray marching code to utilize a noise function is one possibility of mitigating such issues that I want to explore in this article. ↪

» Working with tuples using swallowing and generic lambdas

» May 26, 2020 | cpp development english | Adrian Kummerländer

Suppose you have some kind of list of types. Such a list can by itself be used to perform any compile time computation one might come up with. So let us suppose that you additionally want to construct a tuple from something that is based on this list. i.e. you want to connect the compile time only type list to a run time object. In such a case you might run into new question such as: How do I call constructors for each of my tuple values? How do I offer access to the tuple values using only the type as a reference? How do I call a function for each value in the tuple while preserving the connection to the compile time list? If such questions are of interest to you, this article might possibly also be. ↪

» A Year of Lattice Boltzmann

» December 31, 2019 | development english math | Adrian Kummerländer

To both not leave the 2010s behind with just one measly article in their last year and to showcase some of the stuff I am currently working on this article covers a bouquet of topics – spanning both math-heavy theory and practical software development as well as travels to new continents. As to retroactively befit the title this past year of mine was dominated by various topics in the field of Lattice Boltzmann Methods. CFD in general and LBM in particular have shaped to become the common denominator of my studies, my work and even my leisure time. ↪

» Expressive meta templates for flexible handling of compile-time constants

» May 25, 2019 | cpp development english | Adrian Kummerländer

So we recently released a new version of OpenLB which includes a major refactoring of the central datastructure used to handle various kinds of compile-time constants required by the simulation. This article will summarize the motivation and design of this new concept as well as highlight a couple of tricks and pitfalls in the context of template metaprogramming. ↪