Tag: design

What made John Carmack a legend in C++ programming? And which lessons to learn from him when adopting the new standards?

Have you already seen a basketball or a soccer player plays a simple yet effective game to such a point that you say: Why couldn’t everybody play like him, he uses only easy techniques?

And as C++ programmer I had the same remark when exploring the John Carmack source code. It’s so simple, we wonder why we can ‘t develop like him.

Let’s explore some Doom3 source code choices and try to understand why the code even if it’s simple, it’s very efficient.

On November 23, 2011 id Software maintained the tradition and it released the source code of their previous engine. This source code was reviewed by many developers, here’s as an example of Doom3 feedback from fabien (orginal source): Continue reading “What made John Carmack a legend in C++ programming? And which lessons to learn from him when adopting the new standards?”

Some design choices boost the performance : V8 javascript engine case study.

The V8 engine is Google’s open source, high-performance JavaScript engine written in C++. Alongside Google Chrome, it can also be found in MongoDb , Node.js, and many other popular applications.

It’s very interesting to discover what makes V8 so fast and which solutions were used to achieve this goal. Continue reading “Some design choices boost the performance : V8 javascript engine case study.”

Stable Abstractions Principle is a success key of your OOP C++ project.

Robert C.Martin wrote an interesting article about a set of metrics that can be used to measure the quality of an object-oriented design in terms of the interdependence between the subsystems of that design.

Here’s from the article what he said about the interdependence between modules:

What is it that makes a design rigid, fragile and difficult to reuse. It is the interdependence of the subsystems within that design. A design is rigid if it cannot be easily changed. Such rigidity is due to the fact that a single change to heavily interdependent software begins a cascade of changes in dependent modules. When the extent of that cascade of change cannot be predicted by the designers or maintainers the impact of the change cannot be estimated. This makes the cost of the change impossible to estimate. Managers, faced with such unpredictability, become reluctant to authorize changes. Thus the design becomes rigid.

And to fight the rigidity he introduces metrics like Afferent coupling, Efferent coupling, Abstractness and Instability. Continue reading “Stable Abstractions Principle is a success key of your OOP C++ project.”

Inside the Unreal Engine 4.5 source code

The Unreal Engine is a game engine developed by Epic Games, first showcased in the 1998 first-person shooter game Unreal. Although primarily developed for first-person shooters, it has been successfully used in a variety of other genres, including stealth, MMORPGs, and other RPGs.

Its code is written in C++ and  it’s used by many game developers today. Its source code is available from GitHub and it’s free for students. Many amazing games were developed using this engine, it permits to produce very realistic rendering like this one. Continue reading “Inside the Unreal Engine 4.5 source code”