What is considered an acceptable preprocessing or transformation? In the limit case, a static executable that computes nothing and outputs a constant, literal image probably violates the intention of the question.
I actually don't think this is how he did it. You might notice the font is kind of weird.
I think he started with an SDF font and created the "assembly language" from that. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signed_distance_function
Assembly language is definitely the right analogy: it's a low-level target generated by higher-level tools. In this case, the expression came from a Python script calling this text(...) function:
https://github.com/mkeeter/antimony/blob/f6a56dd7/py/fab/sha...
The font is hand-built from geometric primitives (rectangles, circles, etc) and CSG operations (union, intersection, difference)
> What is considered an acceptable preprocessing or transformation?
I'm looking for interesting ideas, and to mine the depths of PLs / compiler / interpreter / runtime research. Just returning a fixed image isn't particularly interesting, but (for example) I just updated the site with a compile-to-CUDA example that shows off the brute force power of a modern GPU.
Fun exercise! I’ve been enjoying trying to find some new ways to approach the challenge. I managed to build a single string expression for the entire program, so it could be evaluated per-pixel in a shader, but it turns out the expression is too complex for WebGL & WebGPU and the shader fails to compile.
My next thought would be to evaluate the program at a low resolution to create a low res SDF texture for the shader to draw at a higher resolution. Some information will probably be lost, though.
By analogy, you wouldn't program in LLVM IR, but it's a useful intermediate representation for a bunch of higher-level languages. Higher-level tools can target this representation, and then they all get to use a standard set of optimizations and algorithms (fast evaluation, rendering, etc).
(I gave a recent talk that's a broad overview of this research: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxGxsGnbyJ4)
> My next thought would be to evaluate the program at a low resolution to create a low res SDF texture for the shader to draw at a higher resolution.
Glad you're enjoying the challenge! You may also be interested in