• Memcheck Clean

    Andy • 04/23/2016 at 18:54 • 0 comments

    I spent quite a lot of time on this today, and the code is now "memcheck clean" which means that Valgrind reports no memory leaks. Hooray! I think this is pretty well optimized now.

  • Multithreading Madness

    Andy • 04/23/2016 at 16:36 • 0 comments

    About a week ago I was working on another piece of software that uses this library (which I may release if it ever works) and I needed to make a shape fit in a very small box (< 1 unit square) because I hadn't set up the camera yet. (That's an OpenGL technicality.) So, I decided that instead of scaling an SVG and using CAM on that, I would instead tell the CAM to use twice as many pixels per inch in order to halve the size of the model, theoretically. As it turns out, that causes the output file to be huge. I was trying to process it when I saw that the program had been running for five minutes with no results. Confused, I looked at the file with Atom only to see that it also took forever to open it. When I looked at the file size I noticed that it was 35MB, which would explain why everything involving it was so slow. I wanted to fix that, because the parser got through 1.6x10^6 lines before crashing with an unfortunate segmentation fault. Thus, multithreading support was under way.

    Read more »

  • Bug squashing

    Andy • 04/22/2016 at 02:47 • 0 comments

    I was about to write about the re-write I just did, except before I published, I decided to do one last check to make sure it was really working. Good thing I did, because it was not working. I'll write the rest once I get the chance and the energy, but the gist is, RS274 got split into several classes and structs and is now fully multithreading capable. As in, if you feed it a 35MB text file, it will saturate your system resources until it's done. It's great, memory consumption is approximately linear!

  • Data gathering

    Andy • 04/12/2016 at 15:22 • 0 comments

    As it turns out, there is a surprising amount of unwritten information in RS274 that can be synthesized via analysis. I've split this program into a CLI frontend and a library, and the library, named RS274, now supports doing some of this analysis. It now synthesizes the following meta-data from each file as it parses:

    Read more »

  • 0 == NULL and atof() is a bother

    Andy • 02/16/2016 at 02:55 • 0 comments

    Bugs in code tend to come together, even worse, they cascade, one leading into another. In this case, there were two problems. First of all, 

    if (0 == NULL) {
  /*This will run*/
}
    This is awful. A value of zero is equivalent to NULL?! Whatever. Don't use NULL, ever. Especially if you're checking if a variable is empty.

    The second problem is:

    atof(""); /* return: 0.0 */
atof("Hello World"); /* return: 0.0 */
    atof returns 0.0f if it fails to convert the given character string into a number. Who thought that was a good idea?!

    Therefore, the code has a new hack: AFTER a line is parsed and "converted" to a number, a check is run to see if the variable that was used to set the coordinates is empty. If it is, then std::nan() is used to overwrite that section of the parsed line struct and later on, when it is important to know whether the variable was empty or not, std::isnan() is used to check. What a mess.
    I updated the Github repository with the latest changes, all seems to be well now. I'm working on compiled binaries to put on this page, because that 1Gb of free space on Hackaday.io is tempting me!

  • In need of testing

    Andy • 02/13/2016 at 01:35 • 0 comments

    Can anyone test this out? It should work on all platforms, I tested it on Linux and Mac OSX.

    I have had no issues with the latest version in the repository, it produces no errors that I can see.
    I hope this helps some of you out! Thanks!