The decorator pattern is one of the classics in the Gang of Four Design Patterns book. Let’s explore this pattern first with a C# example. This is just your average decorator, which as the code comments say, employs inheritance and…
Letter Boxed: Rust impl, part 4 (complete solver)
After some incremental progress in our Letter Boxed solver, we’re now ready to complete the app. Our hard-won “expertise” in Rust now makes the last several steps largely mechanical. The first set of changes produces LetterBox and Vertices structs, so…
Letter Boxed: Rust impl, part 3 (modules, trie, I/O)
Our Rust-based Letter Boxed code so far has just the core character-based data types. Today we’ll add the trie. Before we move on, we need to keep our house in order. Rather than have one massive lib.rs file, we should…
Letter Boxed: Rust impl, part 2 (panicking, hashing, parsing)
Previously we began our Rust exploration of Letter Boxed with the core St and Ch structs. Now we’ll complete their functionality. The next test on our TODO list looks like this in the C# version: We’ve already encountered our first…
Letter Boxed: Rust impl, part 1 (basics)
We’ve already set up the development environment, so let’s write some Rust code! A good place to start is with the bottom layer data structures, known as Str and Ch in the C# version. To review, Ch is an enumeration…
Letter Boxed: introducing Rust!
In the ongoing Letter Boxed solver saga, we have explored native code from the C++ angle. After all, C++ is still comfortably among the top of the close-to-the-metal programming languages (at least according to some sources). But it’s 2021 AD…
Cross-platform without complexity: shared libraries
Continuing from our cross-platform project skeleton, let’s try to add a shared library. Windows users may know these as dynamic link libraries (DLLs), while Linux users would recognize them as shared objects (.so). To make things even trickier, most Windows…
Cross-platform without complexity: command line
At this point we have a Windows build and remote Linux build working from Windows in the Visual Studio IDE. This is all good and it’s hard to beat VS in terms of productivity while actively developing the code. However,…
Cross-platform without complexity: remote Linux
Previously, we showed how to enable the Visual Studio IDE to work with an ostensibly cross-platform CMake project. Today we will prove that the project indeed can work on a non-Windows platform — at least as much as is possible…
Cross-platform without complexity: VS IDE
Let’s say you want to start a modern C++ project. However, you have some requirements in mind that may be hard to achieve. First, the project should support development in the Visual Studio IDE but also provide a simple command…