Awesome tools for Windows users

I moved back to Windows on my home computer a few months back. There are a few amazing free tools I've found since then that have been making my life better and I thought they deserved a shout-out. They are:

SumatraPDF
A fantastic PDF reader. Does everything I want and nothing I don't.

RapidEE
A sane way to edit environment variables. The simple joy of just being able to resize the window is... incredible.

7-Zip
The best tool for dealing with compressed files on windows, bar none.

GPU-Z
A really handy way to see details about your GPU(s).

XnView
An amazingly good image viewer, which can also do bulk file format conversions.

If you haven't already got these... go get them!

Comments

How to outperform std::vector in 1 easy step

Everyone who's familiar with C++ knows that you should avoid resizing a std::vector inside a loop wherever possible. The reasoning's pretty obvious: the memory allocated for the vector doubles in size each time it fills up and that doubling is a costly operation. Have you ever wondered why it's so costly though? It's tempting to assume that because implementations of the STL have been around for so long that they must be pretty efficient. It turns out that's a bad assumption because the problem, in this case, is the standard itself: specifically, the allocator interface. The allocator interface provides two methods that obtain and release memory: allocate allocates uninitialized storage (public member function) deallocate deallocates storage (public member function) (taken from this page ). What's missing is a way of growing an existing memory allocation in place. In C this is provided by the realloc function, but there's no equiva...

LD_DEBUG

Posting this mainly as a reminder to myself... If you ever find yourself needing to figure out a dynamic library loading problem on Linux, LD_DEBUG can be a massive help. This is an environment variable you can set to make the dynamic linker print out a ton of useful diagnostic info. There are a number of different values which control the amount and type of diagnostics printed. One of the values is help; if you set LD_DEBUG to this and run executable it will print out a list of all the available options along with brief descriptions. For example, on my Linux workstation at the office: > LD_DEBUG=help cat Valid options for the LD_DEBUG environment variable are: libs display library search paths reloc display relocation processing files display progress for input file symbols display symbol table processing bindings display information about symbol binding versions display version dependencies all all previous options combi...

Triangle bounding boxes in a single byte

Just thought of a way to store the bounding box for a single triangle in only one byte. It's not really practical or something you'd ever really want to use, but what the hell. Assume we have some kind of indexed mesh structure with a list of vertex positions and a list of triangle indices: struct Mesh { std::vector<vec3> verts; std::vector<uvec3> triangles; }; We can find the bounding box of a triangle by taking the min and max of all three vertices: vec3 Mesh::lowerBound(uint32_t tri) const { vec3 v0 = verts[triangles[tri].x]; vec3 v1 = verts[triangles[tri].y]; vec3 v2 = verts[triangles[tri].z]; return min(min(v0, v1), v2); } vec3 Mesh::upperBound(uint32_t tri) const { vec3 v0 = verts[triangles[tri].x]; vec3 v1 = verts[triangles[tri].y]; vec3 v2 = verts[triangles[tri].z]; return ...

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