Threading through every previous post in this series is one phrase: “taken from my open source project”. Time to give the open source work its own chapter — because for about a decade, most of what I wrote ended up public, first on SourceForge, later on GitHub.
Delphi ASIO & VST
The mothership was the Delphi ASIO & VST Packages, co-written initially with Tobybear: a DSP base component with optimized math routines, a VST host component (Tobybear’s well-known MiniHost was built around it), a battle-tested ASIO host component, and a VST plugin wizard with demos ranging from filters to synths. Electri-Q is probably the most famous thing built on it. Nearly all the plugins, SE modules and tools from the earlier posts were examples for this project — dozens of open source plugins, from 2-Band Distortion to a Chebyshev waveshaper, live on the Open Source pages.
Graphics32 and the 2D thread
As part of Team Graphics32 I was mostly responsible for the 1.9.1 release — SSE2 optimizations, 64-bit support, better Lazarus/OSX support — and reviewed a large part of the optimized blend code. Around it grew the GR32 PNG library, a seam carving implementation, and AggPasMod, my modernized Pascal port of Anti-Grain Geometry with assembler optimizations and cleaner code. PascalType added font-file parsing to that ecosystem.
The long tail
My GitHub account holds the long tail of those years: contributions to DWScript and a DWScript language server, Pascal bindings for SFML, OpenCL and FFTW3, a differential evolution optimizer, a JSON-based web updater — and, amusingly, the most-starred repository of them all: the ComPort-Library, a serial-port library for Delphi rescued from SourceForge, which quietly became infrastructure for other people’s projects.
Open source was never a side activity; it was the way I learned in public. The next posts jump to the present — where the same habit continues in a different language.