Posts in 2020 — Alex Carney

Evaluating a Simple Abstract Syntax Tree

Programming languages and their implementation is a topic I’ve been interested in for a long time and I thought it would be worth trying to get a bit more hands on and play with some of the ideas in this space. Choosing a topic somewhat at random I’ve chosen to take a look at implementing an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST).

Passing strings between TinyGo and JavaScript

After getting a "Hello, World!" WebAssembly application working I thought it would be fun to try and implement a toy programming language in the browser. However before I could even start thinking about parsers, abstract syntax trees and the like I had to be able to pass strings between my WebAssembly module and the surrounding JavaScript.

Turns out that is much trickier than I expected.

Saying ‘Hello, World!’ with TinyGo and WebAssembly

WebAssembly is something I’ve wanted to play with for quite a while now and I’ve finally got around to taking a look at it. In this post I describe how I managed to use TinyGo to compile a “Hello, World!” Go program into WebAssembly and execute it in the browser. So that I have something to refer back to I also describe setting up my development environment as a container using LXD.

Learning Vulkan: Enumerating Physical Devices

Being an API for talking to GPUs and other compute devices every Vulkan program starts off by looking for an appropriate physical device to use. In this post I write a little C program that initialises the Vulkan API and lists out the available devices in the system.

$ vkdevice
Device Name:            Intel(R) HD Graphics 520 (Skylake GT2)
  Type:                 Integrated GPU
  Vendor ID:            32902
  Device ID:            6422
  API Version:          v1.1.102
  Driver Version:       v19.3.1

Learning Vulkan: Overview

I have always been interested in graphics and have on numerous occasions tried to dip my toe into the world of OpenGL and more recently Vulkan. However I have never been able to get past the “Hello, World” of these technologies - drawing a triangle on screen, I think mostly becuase I never really had a goal in mind once I got that far…

But that’s (hopefully) about to change! What better excuse than a new decade to jump back into this world for the 100th time and try to get to all those interesting ideas I see people playing with all the time!