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• Started Programming Young

  6 septembre 2011, par Multimedia Mike — Programming

  I have some of the strangest memories of my struggles to jump into computer programming.

  Back To BASIC
  I remember doing some Logo programming on Apple II computers at school in 5th grade (1987 timeframe). But that was mostly driving turtle graphics. Then I remember doing some TRS-80 BASIC in 7th grade, circa 1989. Emboldened by what very little I had learned in perhaps the week or 2 we took in a science class to do this, I tried a little GW-BASIC on my family’s “IBM-PC compatible” computer (they were still called that back then). I still remember what my first program consisted of. Even back then I was interested in manipulating graphics and color on a computer screen. Thus :

  10 color 1
  20 print "This is color 1"
  30 color 2
  40 print "This is color 2"
  ...
  

  And so on through 15 colors. Hey, it did the job– it demonstrated the 15 different colors you could set in text mode.

  What’s FOR For ?
  That 7th grade computer unit in science class wasn’t very thick on computer science details. I recall working with a lab partner to transcribe code listings into a computer (and also saving my work to a storage cassette). We also developed form processing programs that would print instructions to input text followed by an “INPUT I$” statement to obtain the user’s output.

  I remember there was some situation where we needed a brief delay between input and printing. The teacher told us to use a construct of the form :

  10 FOR I = 1 TO 20000
  20 NEXT I
  

  We had to calibrate the number based on our empirical assessment of how long it lasted but I recall that the number couldn’t be much higher than about 32000, for reasons that would become clearer much later.

  Imagine my confusion when I would read and try to comprehend BASIC program code I would find in magazines. I would of course see that FOR..NEXT construct all over the place but obviously not in the context of introducing deliberate execution delays. Indeed, my understanding of one of the fundamental building blocks of computer programming — iteration — was completely skewed because of this early lesson.

  Refactoring
  Somewhere along the line, I figured out that the FOR..NEXT could be used to do the same thing a bunch of times, possibly with different values. A few years after I had written that color program, I found it again and realized that I could write it as :

  10 for I = 1 to 15
  20 color I
  30 print I
  40 next I
  

  It still took me a few more years to sort out the meaning of WHILE..WEND, though.

• ARM compiler shoot-out, round 2

       
  20 août 2009, par Mans — ARM, Compilers

  In my recent test of ARM compilers, I had to leave out Texas Instrument’s compiler since it failed to build FFmpeg. Since then, the TI compiler team has been busy fixing bugs, and a snapshot I was given to test was able to build enough of a somewhat patched FFmpeg that I can now present round two in this shoot-out.

  The contenders this time were the fastest GCC variant from round one, ARM RVCT, and newcomer TI TMS470. With the same rules as last time, the exact versions and optimisation options were like this :

  • CodeSourcery GCC 2009q1 (based on 4.3.3), -mfpu=neon -mfloat-abi=softfp -mcpu=cortex-a8 -std=c99 -fomit-frame-pointer -O3 -fno-math-errno -fno-signed-zeros -fno-tree-vectorize
  • ARM RVCT 4.0 Build 591, -mfpu=neon -mfloat-abi=softfp -mcpu=cortex-a8 -std=c99 -fomit-frame-pointer -O3 -fno-math-errno -fno-signed-zeros
  • TI TMS470 4.7.0-a9229, --float_support=vfpv3 -mv=7a8 -O3 -mf=5

  
  To keep things fair, I left the vectoriser off also with the TI compiler. The table below lists the decoding times for the sample files, this time normalised against the participating GCC compiler. Remember, smaller numbers are better. Also keep in mind that this test was done with a development snapshot of TMS470, not an approved release.

  Sample name	Codec	Code type	GCC	RVCT	TI
  cathedral	H.264 CABAC	integer	1.00	0.95	1.02
  NeroAVC	H.264 CABAC	integer	1.00	0.96	1.05
  indiana_jones_4	H.264 CAVLC	integer	1.00	0.92	1.02
  NeroRecodeSample	MPEG-4 ASP	integer	1.00	1.01	1.08
  Silent_Light	MP3	64-bit integer	1.00	0.48	0.72
  When_I_Grow_Up	FLAC	integer	1.00	0.87	0.93
  Lumme-Badloop	Vorbis	float	1.00	0.94	1.05
  Canyon	AC-3	float	1.00	0.88	1.01
  lotr	DTS	float	1.00	1.00	1.08

  Overall, the TI TMS470 compiler comes off slightly worse than GCC. In two cases, however, it was significantly better than GCC, but not as good as RVCT. Incidentally, those were also the ones where RVCT scored the biggest win over GCC.

  My conclusions from this test are twofold :

  • ARM’s own compiler is very hard to beat. They do seem to know how their chips work.
  • GCC is incredibly bad at 64-bit arithmetic on 32-bit machines.

  The logical next step is to test these compilers with vectorisation enabled. FFmpeg should offer plenty of opportunities for this feature to shine. Unfortunately, that test will have to wait until the RVCT vectoriser is fixed. The current release does not compile FFmpeg with vectorisation enabled.

• vp9 : Flip the order of arguments in MC functions

  3 novembre 2016, par Martin Storsjö

  vp9 : Flip the order of arguments in MC functions
  This makes it match the pattern already used for VP8 MC functions.
  This also makes the signature match ffmpeg’s version of these
  
  functions, easing porting of code in both directions.
  Signed-off-by : Martin Storsjö <martin@martin.st>
  

  • [DBH] libavcodec/vp9.h
  • [DBH] libavcodec/vp9block.c
  • [DBH] libavcodec/vp9dsp.c
  • [DBH] libavcodec/x86/vp9dsp_init.c
  • [DBH] libavcodec/x86/vp9mc.asm
  • [DBH] tests/checkasm/vp9dsp.c