U8String VS FFmpeg

Writing performance-sensitive code in C and calling it via interop used to be the way to go during .NET Framework days but since then has become a performance trap.

Especially for small methods, calling them through interop is a deoptimization because they cannot be inlined, and involve GC frame transition (which you can suppress) as well as an indirect jump and maybe interop stub unless you are statically linking the dependency into your AOT deployment. In case the arguments are not blittable to C - marshalling too.

It is also complicates the publishing process because you have to build both .NET and C parts and then package them together, considering the matrix of [win, linux, macos] x [x64, arm64], it turns into quite an unpleasant experience.

Instead, the recommended approach is just continuing to write C# code, except with pointer and/or ref based code. This is what CoreLib itself does for the most performance-sensitive bits[0]. Naturally, it intentionally looks ugly like in Rust, but you can easily fix it with a few extension methods[1].

[0]: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/main/src/libraries/Sy...

[1]: https://github.com/U8String/U8String/blob/main/Sources/Share...

FFmpeg (https://ffmpeg.org/)

GPL2

Since FFmpeg is GPL2, doesn’t that require CompressX to disclose its source code?

IANAL, apologies if I miss understand license requirements.

https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg?tab=License-1-ov-file

This turns out to be a lot of assembly macros to help write one x86 assembly. https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/blob/master/libavutil/x86/x...

The sibling comment recommending compiler intrinsics is probably the best way to go for writing SIMD code. A mixture of `` style types and intrinsics to specify instructions is a solid 90% solution compared to assembly.

If you want that last 10%, I think macros are putting the emphasis in the wrong place. They're a somewhat easy way to build up a language abstraction which will work if held carefully, but I'm confident the dev experience using this abstraction when you write invalid code will be deeply confusing.

I would suggest to write a parser instead of the macros. That'll tell you clearly when the syntax is invalid (though possibly not with much precision) and it'll give you a place to put semantic analysis for where valid syntax encodes nonsense. Do the equivalent of the macro expansions on the parsed tree instead of on the text. Emit asm as the "back end".

You might have heard of FFMPEG or ImageMagick for image and video edition in a programmatic way. MoviePy is a Python module for video editing (Python wrapper for FFMPEG and ImageMagick). It provides functions for cutting, concatenations, title insertions, video compositing, video processing, and the creation of custom effects. It can read and write common video and audio formats and be run on any platform with Python 2.7 or 3+.

There are many cloud-based tools and websites that can convert your images, but the problem with these tools is that you usually have to upload the files for them to be processed, and some of their services are not free. In this article, I'd like to introduce a piece of software called FFmpeg, which allows you convert the images locally with one simple command.

To run the demo locally, be sure to have Python 3.11 and FFmpeg installed.