I had an interesting conversation with a friend the other day. She wanted to try putting together a weekend "hackathon" just to see what we could build. It would be one of those fun things where we just start tinkering and see what comes out of it.Somehow, this conversation got to the topic of libraries, programming languages, and frameworks. Then it got a little weird.I guess the current "shiny" thing is still more-or-less Ruby, and particularly when used with Rails. Oh, I suppose there's also the whole node thing, in which you write things in Javascript and run them server-side with v8. ...

Enterprise development and networking specialist Stephen B. Morris illustrates how to handle a classic C/C++ problem by using the new features in C++ 11 in conjunction with more established techniques.Memory management has always been one of the most error-prone areas of C++. The same is true of C. One of the strengths of managed languages, such as Java and C#, is their support for automatic garbage collection. Garbage collection still isn't a feature of C++ 11, so we must still be careful in our memory management. However, there is some good news: C++ 11 has added features that strengthen the...

After two months of Sol Trader development in Ruby, I took a difficult decision last Wednesday morning: I’ve decided to rewrite the game code from scratch in C++. Let me explain my reasons. If you'd like to receive announcements about Sol Trader or be part of the beta program, sign up at soltrader.net.Why I did itSlow frames: When working with Ruby, I use the excellent Gosu library to do all my game specific coding. This initially worked great, but occasionally I’d just get slow frames coming up. My game is timed to run at 60 frames per second, which means that each frame should...

It is Christmas over here, and it is time of giving. So I decided to give something back to the community. I guess this is as old as web programming itself. Trying to create C++ web framework. If you search on the web, you can find dozen of guys that had exactly the same idea. I am not different. For one of the previous projects(discontinued now) I created simple web framework in C++. If you like to hack in C++, here it is. Code is provided as-is, as part of larger application. You can extract framework code itself, use only some portions of it, or use whole application, if you like. I do not ...

This morning Miroslav Bajtoš asked “Why do C++ folks make things so complicated?” in response to my article on regular expressions in C++. Other people asked similar questions yesterday.My response has two parts:Why I believe C++ libraries are often complicated.Why I don’t think it has to be that way.Why would someone be using C++ in the first place? Most likely because they need performance or fine-grained control that they cannot get somewhere else. A Ruby programmer, for example, can make a design decision that makes code 10% slower but much easier to use. “Hey, ...

The code for this tutorial is on GitHub: https://github.com/sol-prog/threads.In my previous tutorials I’ve presented some of the newest C++11 additions to the language: regular expressions, raw strings and lambdas.Perhaps one of the biggest change to the language is the addition of multithreading support. Before C++11, it was possible to target multicore computers using OS facilities (pthreads on Unix like systems) or libraries like OpenMP and MPI.This tutorial is meant to get you started with C++11 threads and not to be an exhaustive reference of the standard.Creating and launching a t...

In C++/CLR (for Microsoft), sometimes we need to convert int to System::String type or vice versa. The simple way is :From System::String^ to int int num= int::Parse(str); // System::String^ to intFrom int to System::String^System::String^ str = num.ToString(); // int to System::String^For all the other data types, similar ways can be adopted....

The terms lvalue and rvalue are not something one runs into often in C/C++ programming, but when one does, it’s usually not immediately clear what they mean. The most common place to run into these terms are in compiler error & warning messages. For example, compiling the following with gcc:int foo() {return 2;}int main(){ foo() = 2; return 0;}You get:test.c: In function 'main':test.c:8:5: error: lvalue required as left operand of assignmentTrue, this code is somewhat perverse and not something you’d write, but the error message mentions lvalue, which is not a term one ...