A new release of Thoreau BASIC, a modernized dialect of the language, introduces built-in commands for file browsing (GETFILES) and interactive list selection (SELECTBOX) with mouse and keyboard support. It also adds STATEWRITE/STATELOAD for checksummed variable checkpointing, CRC32 and TEXTSTATS utilities, and a SYSTEMINFO$ function reporting CPU, AVX2/SSE2 support and build details. The update also includes JIT improvements for floating-point and complex/quaternion/octonion math, plus a RUN fix to avoid stack growth on restart.
thoreaubasic.com
· 2026-10-03
A blog post by the Box3D physics engine developer details how the separating axis test (SAT), used to compute contact manifolds between convex polytopes, can become computationally expensive—up to O(N^3) in vertex count—largely due to edge-pair testing. The post outlines existing optimizations already in Box3D, including Gauss maps, SIMD edge-pair testing, feature caching, and contact recycling, before introducing an inscribed-sphere technique credited to Pierre Terdiman from 2011 as a further speed-up method.
box2d.org
· 2026-09-29
The author, who previously surveyed Rust's SIMD ecosystem, has since become a maintainer of the Fearless SIMD library after contributing to it. For this year's follow-up survey, they invited maintainers of competing libraries—std::simd, wide, pulp, and macerator—to review a draft, while keeping final editorial control. The piece revisits SIMD fundamentals and surveys progress across the Rust SIMD tooling landscape over the past year.
shnatsel.github.io
· 2026-09-25
Go 1.26 introduced architecture-specific SIMD APIs for amd64, and Go 1.27 extends this with support for arm64 (NEON) and wasm. Go 1.27 also adds an experimental, platform-agnostic 'simd' package modeled loosely on the C++ Highway library, letting developers write vector code once that runs across AVX, AVX2, AVX512, NEON, and wasm SIMD instructions, with software emulation on unsupported platforms.
go.dev
· 2026-09-25
The Fearless SIMD project, first prototyped eight years ago, has released version 1.0 according to a blog post by its maintainer Shnatsel. The library provides portable SIMD abstractions and safe access to platform intrinsics without requiring unsafe code, while supporting both autovectorization and manual control for performance-critical code.
linebender.org
· 2026-09-22
GoKawiil