KiCad, a PCB EDA suite is now working in a browser, you can try it at the link, there's a demo project or you can bring your own. Firefox is best, Chrome is good, Safari is "working".We’re Emergence Engineering, a dev shop from Hungary, mostly working with rich text editors, CRDTs. PCBJam started as my (Viktor, CTO, ex-electrical engineer) hobby project but as time went on I put more and more energy into it, and a product started shaping up in my head, in the last few months we’ve started to focus on this project a bit more, and this is the first MVP~ish result.This project is a ton of fun, ton of learning, ton of improvements over improvements:- I thought there must be ways to emulate the PCB canvas OpenGL code on the web. And yes, there are a lot of ways, all of them very buggy. Turns out it’s faster to just write WebGL code that works with KiCad’s Graphics Abstraction Layer if you add the right intermediate debugging steps. I (with Claude) implemented the features and compared them to native at every step, then the app loaded up the first time and just worked. I spent weeks hunting weird emulation bugs before that.- There was an old wxWidgets web port as a starting point that helped a lot, bringing it up to the level KiCad needed is a long (and still ongoing) task. Thanks ahilss!- Pthreads on the web: with Emscripten it’s possible to port multithreaded apps (used by DRC, software 3D renderer). A lot of Emscripten features (Asyncify, Pthreads, native exceptions) are in a war with each other, but it’s possible.- Asyncify with native exceptions: Asyncify (used to make the WASM code suspend then call into the JS land, emulating blocking C++ calls by rewriting the WASM directly) is not compatible with native exceptions, even on the latest Binaryen version it can’t suspend inside catch arms. If you write a new Binaryen pass then it can, making the bundle 30-40% smaller and the app load in a second instead of 10.- Optimizing bundle size is a fun game. We
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Last summer we faced a conundrum at my company, Tiger Data, a Postgres cloud vendor whose main business is in timeseries data. We were trying to grow our business towards emerging AI-centric workloads and wanted to provide a state-of-the-art hybrid search stack in Postgres. We'd already built pgvectorscale in house with the goal of scaling semantic search beyond pgvector's main memory limitations. We just needed a scalable ranked keyword search solution too.The problem: core Postgres doesn't provide this; the leading Postgres BM25 extension, ParadeDB, is guarded behind AGPL; developing our own extension appeared daunting. We'd need a small team of sharp engineers and 6-12 months, I figured. And we'd probably still fall short of the performance of a mature system like Parade/Tantivy.Or would we? I'd be experimenting long enough with AI-boosted development at that point to realize that with the latest tools (Claude Code + Opus) and an experienced hand (I've been working in database systems internals for 25 years now), the old time estimates pretty much go out the window.I told our CTO I thought I could solo the project in one quarter. This raised some eyebrows.It did take a little more time than that (two quarters), and we got some real help from the community (amazing!) after open-sourcing the pre-release. But I'm thrilled/exhausted today to share that pg_textsearch v1.0 is freely available via open source (Postgres license), on Tiger Data cloud, and hopefully soon, a hyperscalar near you:https://github.com/timescale/pg_textsearchIn the blog post accompanying the release, I overview the architecture and present benchmark results using MS-MARCO. To my surprise, we were not only able to meet Parade/Tantivy's query performance, but exceed it substantially, measuring a 4.7x advantage on query throughput at scale:https://www.tigerdata.com/blog/pg-textsearch-bm25-fu
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Hi HN!I recently switched from a Fedora/GNOME laptop to a MacBook Air. My old setup served me well as a portable workstation, but I’ve started traveling more while working remotely and needed something with similar performance but better battery life. The main thing I missed was a simple taskbar that shows the windows in the current workspace instead of a Dock that mixes everything together.I built boringBar so I would not have to use the Dock. It shows only the windows in the current Space, lets you switch Spaces by scrolling on the bar, and adds a desktop switcher so you can jump directly to any Space. You can also hide the system Dock, pin apps, preview windows with thumbnails, and launch apps from a searchable menu (I keep Spotlight disabled because for some reason it uses a lot of system resources on my machine).I’ve been dogfooding it for a few months now, and it finally felt polished enough to share.It’s for people who like macOS but want window management to feel a bit more like GNOME, Windows, or a traditional taskbar. It’s also for people like me who wanted an easier transition to macOS, especially now that Windows feels increasingly user-hostile.I’d love feedback on the UX, bugs, and whether this solves the same Dock/Spaces pain for anyone else.P.S. It might also appeal to people who feel nostalgic for the GNOME 2 desktop of yore. I started my Linux journey with it, and boringBar brings back some of that feeling for me.
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### Describe the project you are working on Godot C# bindings ### Describe the problem or limitation you are having in your project For the past weeks, I've been discussing with several Unity users intending to move to Godot C# regarding dealing with the C# garbage collector. The most common complaint I hear from users is that, in Unity, allocations can trigger unexpected GC spikes into the game. In Godot, we target to make all of the high performance APIs (those that intended to be called every frame) not allocate any memory, so theoretically the GC should not be a problem. Additionally, Godot starting from 4.0, uses the Microsoft CoreCLR version of .net, which also supposedly has a better garbage collector than Unity. But in all, after several discussions with Unity users, neither is enough reassurance for them, and they would really feel safer if Godot exposed a zero allocation API. ### Describe the feature / enhancement and how it helps to overcome the problem or limitation The idea of this proposal is that Godot exposes zero allocation versions of many functions in the C# API, that users can use if they desire. Technically, this could be done from the binding generator itself, without breaking compatibility, and without doing any modification to Godot itself. ### Describe how your proposal will work, with code, pseudo-code, mock-ups, and/or diagrams **WARNING** I am not familiar with C#, so take this as pseudocode. Imagine you have two functions exposed as to C#: ```C# void MyClass.SetArray( Vector2[] array); Vector2[] MyClass.GetArray(); ``` This works and is pretty and intuitive. However, it has two problems: * GC is allocated on return * Memory is copied to Godot native formats every time there is a call. The idea is to add NoAlloc versions, which can be generated directly by the binder automatically when required: ```C# void MyClass.SetArrayNoAlloc( Godot.Collections.PackedVector2Array array); void MyCl
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