EmptyCrate Software. Travel. Stuff.

I've been following a few different news sources lately and have found a few good articles and projects I thought I would share.

• Building QuickBooks: How Intuit Manages 10 Million Lines of Code. Dr Dobb's discusses the gigantic code base that is QuickBooks. There are lessons to be learned here about automated sanity checks, nightly unit tests and quickly compiling a large code base.

We are proud to announce two new ChaiScript releases:

ChaiScript 4.0.0

• Lots of bug fixes
• Performance improvements
• Support for ?: ternary operators
• Support for switch statements

ChaiScript 5.0.0

This release is a complete retooling of ChaiScript that uses C++11 instead of Boost.

• Better performance
• Truly 0 external dependencies
• ChaiScript stdlib can optionally be compiled separately as a loadable module

We've already covered C++11 decltype and why you should start using C++11 features today. Now we will move on to one of the most widely supported C++11 features: the new auto keyword.

auto is supported currently by g++ as of 4.4, clang and msvc since 10. So you are safe using it today if you don't need to support any older compilers.

Recently, while watching the GoingNative conference, I learned about the new std::shared_ptr helper function std::make_shared. In the talk Stephan T. Lavavej discusses the performance improvements they've made. It seems std::make_shared can save a few extra allocations and a bit of memory overhead. This can be significant if you dynamically create lots of objects.

I like to connect to Virtual Box guest operating systems remotely over RDP connections. This generally works well except if I connect from my 1280x720 laptop to a Windows guest. In this case the Windows guest will tend to resize to a "standard" resolution that fits inside of the 1280x720, which is 800x600. This can be rather obnoxious.

Quick, which language is the following code written in?

%:include <iostream>
 
int main(int, char *argv<:??))
<%
  int i = 0;
  int j = 0;
 
  for (; i < 10 and j < 11; ++i, ++j) ??< 
    std::cout << not (i bitand j) << std::endl;
  %>
??>

If you guessed standard C++, you'd be correct. C and C++ support a set of alternative tokens and character sequences to account for languages and keyboards that do not have easy access to characters that those of us with US keyboards consider to be normal.

Trigraph Sequences