Tuesday, December 7, 2010

About C / C++ / C#: Challenge 41 Just About Marked

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From David Bolton, your Guide to C / C++ / C#
There are 18 entries plus one that needs Mingw32 so I'll have that finished later today. Congrats to both Gustavo Giráldez and Christian Beaumont for such fast times that only vary by 5 Milli-seconds. Christian's was written in C# so it shows just how fast managed code can run. I should have had my new PC by now but the delivery company decided it should have a tour of East England postal depots first before it gets to me. Thanks guys! Have a great week!

Fast Light Toolkit
This is one of the lesser known C++ GUI toolkits compared to the likes of WxWidgets or Qt. The main part of FLTK is the library which lets you create a graphical user interface that will build and look similar on multiple platforms. It's over 50,000 lines of code and getting started takes a bit of reading. There are over 900 articles in the web documentation library which is not very well organized; there's an awful lot to browse or search in there . Everyone has their favorites and if I were doing regular C++ development, I'd be tempted to try this as it's light weight and the GUI looks clean. Having to learn a new GUI framework is not trivial. It's clear that the project's developers have professional software development experience and the documentation is comprehensive. Most important is that the project is still under active development with release 7893 of FLTK 1.3 just a few days ago.

Evolution Is Slow...
Sadly I haven't developed any super powers recently, I'm sure it's only matter of time before I acquire the ability to fly etc, but I'll need maybe a million years or so and I haven't really got the time for that. Doing experiments in evolution is a difficult thing to do as the process is slow in the real world! One way is to simulate evolution in software and that's where Avida comes from. As Wikipedia describes it, it's a form of CoreWar (but written in C) where programs evolve and try to compete for CPU resources. Avida is an experiment and simulates a parallel computer so it all happens in parallel and it records all aspects of a population. Since 1993, Avida has had many new features added, including localized resources, a scheduled events system, multiple CPU types and a sophisticated analysis mode to post-process data from an Avida experiment.

Contest 42 is Now Ready
Screen shot of racetrack display appThe racetrack file has been uploaded and it's a very small file! Out of interest, to test that it looked ok and help me visualize it, I wrote a short C# application that took the input data and displayed it as a track. Then I thought I'll write it up as a Quick Tip, explaining how to plot lines on a Winform using sin/cos trigonometry to calculate points from angles and lengths. You can download the source code and compile/run it yourself. If you come up with a decent track or two, please email me at cplus.guide@about.com and I'll use it to mark contest 42.

Development Projects from Initial Design to Completed Code
Each project is a complete application with notes on the requirements, the design, the architecture, code and final project review. With full source code in C, C++ or C#.

 


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David Bolton
C / C++ / C# Guide
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Wednesday, December 1, 2010

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