Big Central Header Files I was thinking about a bit of a design thing I've notice in certain pedagogical and intentionally small codebases have -- often applications and not libraries -- of having a central file of like foo.h , which contains all of the internal implementation details, usually with each logical sub-system in a sub-area. Each of these logical subsections can have it's own…
Soft (Director's Cut) by Jane Mei Review 5/5 Book site Soft is a retelling of Carmilla but set in from what I can tell is turn of the 21st century Hong Kong. The story focus on Laura (now the child of a restaurant manager) who meets and starts seeing the titular Carmilla, a Vampire who is feeding on the local community. They end up forming a close relationship that leads to Laura being…
CMake: the Good, the Bad, the Weird CMake is one of the most popular build systems in the C/++ ecosystem according to a few recent developer surveys ( IsoCPP survey , CLion Survey ). At the same time, it's kind of an infamous one -- anytime I see it mentioned, I see a lot of negative feelings and opinions toward the language. I think it's important to acknowledge peoples feelings…
A C++ Mixin System I've had this idea in the back of my head for a while of pervasively using mixins to add code and logic for more high level concepts, although this gets somewhat close to Rust style traits (and C++ concepts). This has existed in the back of my head for a long time as a way to model a framework or standard library implementaiton while also providing it for user types. I…
Thoughts on Logging I read two blog posts recently that made me think about blogging: A footnote in Hillel Wayne's Why Not Comment and another blog post about continious improvement of codebases. I've been thinking about logging for a second, and so alos had the thought of thinking about it. Log levels may be too granular A lot of logging systems (in addition to allow custom logging)…
Author book site I enjoyed the setup for this book, but found the plot twists and changes more confusing and hard to follow as it went on, as the dual perspectives of the characters during the time of the plane crash and the characters in modern day, dealing with media attention. I think given time I could appreciate more the sort of messy web of half truths and manipulations work out, but the…
Slayer Shock 3/5 game website itch.io purchase link Slayer Shock is what the video game equivalent of competent fanfiction is for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which it carefully avoids mentioning on any of it sites despite the clear influence. I'm not very familiar with Buffy or Angel aside from a kind of high level overview, but it leans on not only the general idea of the show having a…
What Moves the Dead Amazon Link Rating: 5/5 I bought this book because a bookstore's cafe had this cute "buy a coffee, buy a book for $5", and it was a good use of $5. This book is explicitly an expansion of Poe's Fall of the house of Usher , but using a 19th century-flavored natural philosophy plot. If you've seen the cover, it does involve fungus. The reviews and book stubs I…
Ashes Afterglow review download link Rating: 4/5 Ashes: Afterglow is a sequel to Ashes: 2063 , and the pair form a strongly linked duology. Funnily enough for something I thought was being praised for something being praised for conforming (in it's own, GZDoom engine way) to modern high budget gaming expectations, the version of Ashes: 2063 I played was in fact a updated version that…
Ashes 2063 download link here Rating: 4/5 Ashes 2063 is described as a doom mod (and, as of the standalone release, no longer technically a mod reliant on the base game either), but really it's just a new game built on the foundation of the GZDoom source port. It's part of a duology with Ashes: Afterglow, and in the style of doomwads that game begins with the map being considered…
Baby's second garbage collector. This blog post is meant to an iteration on the tutorial and introduction to garbage collection implementation presented in this classic blog post . We are still working with simple garbage collectors, but this time another one with a bit more complexity. I thought this would be cool because the original code already has a tiny but functional mutator and a set…
The garbage collection handbook 4/5 purchase link . This book is a bit of a hard one to talk about, because a new version of the book is going to come out soon. If you are reading this, I'd recommend buying the newer edition when it comes out. This book feels like a collection of blog posts on the topic of garbage collector design -- it first covers the 4 major algorithm types (reference…
What I wished I knew when learning C This article is a response/take on both Daniel Bachler's article on learning F# and Hillel Wayne's on the hard part of learning a new language . I thought it would be educational and a fun exercise to read this article, but covering C. Often teaching tutorials don't focus as much on the surrounding ecosystem of how to do development, what…
Horrorstor Rating: 4/5 Purchase link As a warning: Horrorstor has some pretty gnarly gore, but the way its presented in the written form kind of makes it pretty tolerable; any attempt to adapt this would either have to tone it way down or be comfortable with some pretty gross body horror. If gore is a big issue for I'd definitely recommend against it. Horrorstor is one of those books…