EmptyCrate Software. Travel. Stuff.

This past Saturday I attended the Developer Day meeting in Boulder, CO. Overall the day was beneficial and interesting even tho it was more dynamic languages centric and very few things applied directly to my C++ development.

I did present ChaiScript during a lightning talk. I'm not sure if I said anything coherent or not but a couple of people chatted with me about it afterward, so I guess it wasn't horrible.

I was recently at a talk where the speaker was discussing the history of C++. He argued that one problem with C++ was that its design requirements included backward compatibility with C code, and one fallout of this was the requirement to support all previous types of error handling as well as adding exceptions. That is, C++ supports:

1. Returning of error codes.
2. Error handling functions.
3. Exception handling.

It is true that C++ supports all 3 of these mechanisms, as well as some other cruft left behind from C that unnecessarily encumbers the language. The speaker's point on this one particular case, however, is lost to the fact that every language supports the first two.

There has been much discussion over the years about the usefulness of operator overloading in C++ as well as the ability to get it right.

In reality, it's hard to get it wrong as long as you follow the canonical forms of the operators and don't do unexpected things like overloade the + operator to perform a subtraction operation. Also, the types that your overloaded operators work with should be consistent.

A couple of weekends ago I decided to borrow a friend's Mac and learn how to do some iPhone development. The result of that weekend's work was a small puzzle game. The game is loosely based on a Palm puzzle game I made several years ago. One way you can support this website, and my open source development work is to buy the application. It's $.99 and available on the iPhone app store.

The experience was my first exposure to Objective-C, which was interesting. In many ways the language feels kind of ugly compared to C++. It's certainly less rigid, and not really what I am use to.

In ChaiScript variable assignments create a copy of the object being assigned.

var x = 5;
var y = x; // Make a copy of x and assign it to y

It's an interesting study in how the ChaiScript language works to dissect this ability to clone an object dynamically. The basic premise is that the function creates and executes a dynamic function call to the object's copy constructor.

ChaiDraw ScreenshotI have been working for the past few weeks on ChaiDraw. ChaiDraw is an application that's both meant as an educational toy and as a showcase for how to effectively use ChaiScript in your application. It turns out it's actually a fun little toy to play with. Check it out if you have an interest in programming toys or especially if you have an interest in ChaiScript.