_drafts/libm_vs_micromath_speed_comparison.qmd

@@ -1,20 +0,0 @@
----
-title: "Rust: libm vs micromath speed comparison"
-author: "James Pace"
-date: "2024/01/16"
----
-
-<!--
-Relevant for comparison:
-1. Distance between two points.
-2. Dicretizing a point into a grid.
-
-
-On laptop libm was way faster...
-~0.23ms compared to 0.70ms in release
-0.73ms compared to 8.66ms in debug
-
-Switching to powi micromath
-0.3ms in release
-3.0ms in debug
--->

_drafts/powf_is_slow.md

@@ -1,61 +0,0 @@
----
-title: "Rust: powf is slow"
-author: "James Pace"
-date: "2024/01/18"
----
-
-I'm currently working on my motion planner on a microcontroller project and
-was looking at switching from [libm][libm] to [micromath][micromath] as the
-library I use for standard math operations.
-For context, in Rust, normal math operations (like absolute value and square
-root for floats) are provided as part of the standard library (called `std`).
-The standard library is not available in environments that don't have a backing
-operating system.
-Crates than run in those environments thus can't use `std`, which is called being
-`no_std`.
-A lot of functions that are in `std` are actually in two other crates, `core` or `alloc`
-which can be used in `no_std` environments.
-The normal math functions aren't one of them, and therefore a different library has to be
-used.
-
-My intitial implementation of the planner used `libm` (largely because I found it first),
-and when I later found `micromath` I wanted to do some profiling comparisons to see which
-one was faster.
-I'm going to make a separate blog post with statistics from the profiling, but I wanted to
-write a quick article today talking about `powf`.
-
-One of the operations my planner does a lot is find the distance between two things.
-My initial implementation did something like
-```rust
-fn distance(point1: &Point, point2: &Point) -> f32 {
-     let squared_dist = powf((point2.x - point1.x), 2.0) + powf((point2.y - point1.y), 2.0);
-     sqrt(squared_dist)
-}
-```
-which works fine.
-
-When I was profiling I switched to:
-```rust
-fn distance(point1: &Point, point2: &Point) -> f32 {
-     let squared_dist = powf((point2.x - point1.x), 2.0) + powf((point2.y - point1.y), 2.0);
-     sqrt(squared_dist)
-}
-```
-which was noticeably faster for both `libm` and `micromath` particularly on the `microbit`
-that I was using for profiling.
-
-## Does this replicate for `std::powf`?
-
-Not when building with `--release`. [^release-rant]
-
-
-
-## How much faster?
-
-[^release-rant]: As an aside, I think I'm going to switch to using `--release` when building rust code
-                 all the time. The optimizations help a ton, to the extent I would never "use" software
-                 not built with `--release` and extrapolating performance, even experientially, from
-                 binaries built with the `dev` profile is just not transferrable at all.
-
-[libm]: https://github.com/rust-lang/libm
-[micromath]: https://github.com/tarcieri/micromath

index.qmd

@@ -9,14 +9,9 @@ listing:
    sort: "date desc"
 ---
 
-*Things I've Learned* or TIL is a site focused on things I've learned
+TIL focuses on things I learned "today" with an emphasis on robotics and
-and found interesting at some point in my life.[^1]
-
-A lot of the "things" will be centered around robotics, programming, and
 open source software.
 
-[^1]: I know TIL normally stands for Today I Learned, but just focusing on what I learned
-today isn't nearly as interesting.
 
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