Captain's Log: Stardate 78195.4

Today I finished tidying up a few loose ends from the work I did to allow multiple simulation backends (OpenCL, Metal, eventually CUDA). The main thing here was to parameterize some of the unit tests, such as the fuzz test, so that they would run against all available backends on each OS. I haven't parameterized the golden tests yet, but that's something I'll definitely do at some point.

After that, I continued work on optimizing the Metal backend. I have some changes that look fairly promising when I run isolated benchmarks, but then when running the full app the performance gains don't appear. This is interesting.

Right now my best guess for what's going on is that the MacOS OpenGL implementation is doing weird/bad stuff behind the scenes. On Windows I've established that the 3D graphics don't interfere in any measurable way with the audio thread's use of the GPU. But on MacOS there does seem to be interference. But it's not related to how much computation is happening -- the interference appears to be there even if Anukari doesn't actually draw any pixels. This is what makes me think that Apple's OpenGL implementation is bad.

So I'd like to rule out weird OpenGL issues as the cause for MacOS slowness. Since I eventually need to port the graphics to Metal, I am going to begin work on that now. There's no guarantee it helps with audio performance, but it might, and anyway I have to do it. Thus today I began integrating with the Google Filament library that I'm planning to use for cross-platform graphics.