So here I am sitting on my dusty laptop gaming laptop (because supposedly it would offer me better performance in compiling code and working with CUDA according to the people above me) at a research institute where I just started working at. I am told that there are some issues with the code and that it fails to build on Windows with MSVC that ships with Visual Studio 2017 and later.

I poor some hot tea from my insulated bottle I brought from home and start reading.

I look in this header file and what do I see - a custom uint24_t struct. Interesting...

I keep sifting through the code base. I find some functions that check and change Endianess. Ok, but the software is developed, built on and runs only on Win7 and later desktop systems. Never mind...

Further I find a custom "allocator" that is used throughout the whole code base. It has three inline static class member functions: allocate, copy and deallocate plus some private constructors. And these just wrap around the standard new and free calls. Some flavours of this class actually only deallocate (with a comment above them: "This allocator does not allocate. HANDLE WITH CARE!!!", which is btw the only "code documentation" I have managed to find).

But wait! What is this? A custom thread and mutex. Oh, and string, and vector.

Further down the rabbit hole I find a custom math library with a matrix class that does not support multiplication between a matrix and a vector. Perhaps not a use case I guess...

I continue and come across some UI-related calls. Interesting, I wonder what they are using as a framework. Oh, my...We have an extensive GUI custom framework written from scratch (drawing buttons and all).

All of this is to load an OBJ file and render it on the screen on a standard Windows PC in some way.

Very nice... ;_;

Looks like vector drawing applications stopped at bezier curves and don’t want to progress much.

I made a inkscape vector image and I used svg patterns to draw some background, then inkscape stopped responding when I’m trying to open that file on mac.

I tried bunch of other vector drawing apps hoping that at least one know what svg vector patterns are, looks like vector drawing applications use bitmaps for patterns and own formats instead of following svg specification.

I even wanted to pay for illustrator 30$ per month but it can’t do it. It opened my svg file claiming there’s no background there just empty space.

When I open svg image from browser it renders correctly but editing with gui is impossible cause all of those great softwares like illustrator, vectronator, sketch, affinity designer can’t handle vector patterns.

I ended up installing inkscape on old laptop that’s running ubuntu desktop.

Inkscape can do everything I want but I still need to delete not used pattens by editing xml.
At least it handles svg better than others.

Seriously vector image drawing apps suck.