John Carmack: A C++ Programming Legend

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 “John Carmack: A C++ Programming Legend”

Thrashing Impact on C++ Performance: Doxygen Analysis

When the processes running on your machine attempt to allocate more memory than your system has available, the kernel begins to swap memory pages to and from the disk. This is done in order to free up sufficient physical memory to meet the RAM allocation requirements of the requestor.

Excessive use of swapping is called thrashing and is undesirable because it lowers overall system performance, mainly because hard drives are far slower than RAM. Continue reading “Thrashing Impact on C++ Performance: Doxygen Analysis”

OOP vs Generics : “Is” vs “Has” approach.

As Bjarne Stroustrup points out, “C++ is a multi-paradigmed language.” It supports many different styles of programs, or paradigms, and object-oriented programming is only one of these. Some of the others are structured programming and generic programming.

And as Thomas Becker explains in this interesting article, there’s a tension between the generic programming and OOP. And here’s from the article the opinion of Alexander Stepanov and elder statesman about OOP:  Continue reading “OOP vs Generics : “Is” vs “Has” approach.”

Boost Performance with V8 Engine: A Design Choices 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 “Boost Performance with V8 Engine: A Design Choices Study”

Exploring Modern C++ Design: MemCache++ Case Study

MemCache++ is a light-weight, type-safe, simple to use and full-featured Memcache client. It was developed by Dean Michael Berris who is a C++ fanatic and currently works at Google Australia. He also is part of the Google delegation to the ISO C++ Committee.

Studying the well-designed libraries is recommended to elevate your  C++ design and implementation skills, and the goal of this article is to discover some memcache++ design choices that make it easy to understand and use. Continue reading “Exploring Modern C++ Design: MemCache++ Case Study”

Don’t touch to my C++ code.

Back to 2005  when I  worked in a company where most of the code was developed in C++, in 2006 the managers decide to develop the new projects with C# and also migrate some C++ projects to C#, here were  their arguments against C++:

  • C++ is too complex.
  • The C++ build system is too difficult to manage and maintain.
  • C++ is stagnated for many years and it’s on its way to dying.
  • It becomes very difficult to recruit a C++ developer.

Continue reading “Don’t touch to my C++ code.”

Being a Productive C++ Developer Without Internet

As developer, How many times during a day you need to ask google for something related to your work? How to use a library? Is there a fix for an encountered problem?

Maybe the answer is at least once a day.

Currently and as developers, the internet saves us a lot of time. Whatever the problem you have, just search the right keywords in google and instantly and in many cases you have a result that matches your need. Continue reading “Being a Productive C++ Developer Without Internet”

Visualizing C/C++ Projects: The Power of Pictures

“A picture is worth a thousand words” is an English idiom. It refers to the notion that a complex idea can be conveyed with just a single still image or that an image of a subject conveys its meaning or essence more effectively than a description does.

This idiom could also be applied in software programming. Indeed you can easilly understand a mini project when exploring its source code. However a big project become complex and not easy to understand.  In such cases it’s better to visualize the source code using graphs and diagrams to assist the developers understanding the source code. Continue reading “Visualizing C/C++ Projects: The Power of Pictures”