T w e n t y S i d e d

Here we are at the end of this series. I was hoping we’d get a public beta of JAI before the end of the year and I could end this by experimenting with a new language, but it looks like that didn’t pan out.

This last vexation isn’t remotely the most serious problem, but it’s the one that annoys me the mostOr maybe it’s second, after header files..

Of all the things that suck the joy out of writing code, I think that managing project files is pretty high on the list. This is sort of linked to the problem where integrating libraries in C++ is a madhouse and a chore. If using someone else’s code was easier, then the headaches of setting up project files would be less of an issue. But these two problems exacerbate each other and force you to spend time putting all the files in the right places and referring to them in the right order.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Programming Vexations Part 13: Project Files”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

In previous entries, I talked about how you sometimes need to worry about small blocks of memory. In some cases, you may even want to worry about how the data is arranged in memory. To show how this works, let’s look at our old friend the space marine:

Space Marines

class SpaceMarine
{
  bool dead;
  char[8] name;
  Vector3 position;
  float stubble;
  short bullets;
  short kills;
  short dead_wives;
  bool cigar;
};

This is a contrived example, but it’s good enough for illustration. This is what the data structure looks like for a single space marine. Here is that same list of fields, except I’ve color-coded them and made boxes illustrating how much memory each field takes up:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Programming Vexations Part 12: SOA vs. AOS”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.