Mentor

Slava Pestov

Technical outline

Factor's graphical user interface library, written completely in Factor, could be faster if certain changes were made.

• Factor's recently-added support for typed words, specialized arrays, and SIMD could speed up geometry and layout calculations.
• Making better use of modern OpenGL could improve rendering performance. All vertex and texture co-ordinates for a single window could be combined into a single vertex buffer, instead of creating vertex arrays and switching them for each UI element. All textures for UI elements could be combined into a single texture atlas, instead of switching state for each element.

References

• The source code for the UI is found in basis/ui/.
• http://docs.factorcode.org/content/article-typed.html
• http://docs.factorcode.org/content/article-math.vectors.simd.html
• http://docs.factorcode.org/content/article-specialized-arrays.html

Benefit to student

The student learns about UI design.

Benefit to community

UI applications in Factor run faster.