Introducing QOI — the Quite OK Image format. It losslessly compresses RGB and RGBA images to a similar size of PNG, while offering a 20x-50x speedup in compression and 3x-4x speedup in decompression. All single-threaded, no SIMD. It's also stupidly simple.

Compared to stb_image and stb_image_write QOI offers 20x-50x faster encoding, 3x-4x faster decoding and 20% better compression. It's also stupidly simple and fits in about 300 lines of C.

benchmark results here 

Stairway to XML

XML has been part of the SQL Standard since 2003, and is essential for any DBA because so many of the dynamic management views return XML data. Now that the industry is more used to data defined by document markup, it is becoming more important than ever for Database Developers and DBAs to understand the technology and to know where it makes sense to use XML. In this book, originally a series of articles on SQLServerCentral.com, Robert Sheldon flexes his talent to make the complicated seem simple. 

Apparently, GitHub’s own syntax highlighting approach isn’t open source, but this takes a similar approach and is. It’s admittedly quite 'heavy' (due to using a WASM build of the Oniguruma regex engine) but that’s the price of quality. 

Jeremy Likness shows some of what's new in EF Core. He first shows off many-to-many relationships [07:30] and then reviews some of what's coming in EF Core 6 [26:30].  

Microsoft on Tuesday released fixes for 58 newly discovered security flaws spanning as many as 11 products and services as part of its final Patch Tuesday of 2020, effectively bringing their CVE total to 1,250 for the year. 

.NEXT (dotNext) is the family of powerful libaries aimed to improve  development productivity and extend .NET API with unique features which potentially will be implemented in the next versions of C# compiler or .NET Runtime.

What follows is sort of a travel log of what I did and how the new CoreCLR functionality fares compared to writing C++ code, when processor intrinsics are involved. 

Did you know that when Googlebot is crawling the Web, it runs a version of Chromium behind the scenes and actually runs your JavaScript? This means there are some things to be aware of. 

The key point is that even if you have a monster development machine with 128 processors, SSD drives and 1TB of memory, Visual Studio will only ever use 2 to 2.5GB of memory.