Thought Outflux | Anirudh Sanjeev

“Can we fix it?
Yes we can!”

They say you can divide all programmers into two categories. Those who rebuild their code every few lines, and those who write their code all day and then build, fixing syntax errors, and then running unit tests, and so on.

I’m trying to shift into the second category, firstly because it seems to be the sensible thing to do, and considering how long some compiles take (my average rebuild and link takes upwards of 300 seconds), doing it every few times can consume a lot of time. Moreover, there’s the time you get into “syntax fixing mode”, and maybe even debug later on, moreover, all the extremely experienced programmers seem to prefer the second and it helps their productivity.

But to each his own, they say.

I for one have a huge fear of writing large modules or refactoring code where I go from one pseudo-working state to another and the build is broken from then on. But then again, getting myself to get started on any major patch is a lot of trouble for me, though it’s no biggie once you get into the mood. But the fear of broken builds is almost a phobia of sorts.

What would you feel is the best way to approach a large project, write code that grows in a very organized way writing unit tests along the way, or let your compiler sit in a corner while you churn out the next masterpiece? Or a personalized mixture of both?

While many people resort to logging for efficient debugging, writing everything to stdout might not be the best thing, especially with cout.

In my perfect world, I’d love to do this:

using namespace std;
#define __DEBUG
#ifdef __DEBUG
#define LOGME cout
#else
#define LOGME //
#endif

int main()  {
  LOGME << "Hello world";
}

But sadly, comment marks are excluded from preprocessors.

If you’re into programming, I’d suggest you read this.

As a developer I’d love if I can write code that anybody can run, on their desktop (as opposed to trying to move it on to a browser so it can be truly cross platform), but let’s just stay away from the operating system in the browser paradigm. Let’s say I want to build an application which would run on windows, mac osx, and linux (and perhaps even bsd, etc). There are three major options I have

1. Write the code in java, and have it execute in a virtual machine. While java is nice, I’m not too fond of having my code run in a virtualized wrapper like format. Moreover, performance concerns, the Java Native Interface, etc do not make this the best choice for me.

2. Write code in a more simplified language like python, or ruby which has language bindings to major system so which allows me to run my code on most systems. This is nice, but there’s the performance concern, the obsfucation and moreover requiring the right version of python or ruby to be installed in the target machine.

3. Write code on C++ with the right cross platform libraries and compile. This is a confusing option because finding good cross platform libraries and learning to use all of them can be very complicated. But this does, however mean that my code will run natively, thus, much faster than the aforementioned options.

My idea deals mostly with number 3. I won’t beat around the bush and get to the point:

1. An easy to use suite of cross platform c++ tools, with open source wrappers to all of them, and are configurable to larger extents.

Here’s what this means. Suppose I needed to build an alarm clock, and wanted it to run natively on all platforms, I first write a “libcollection†file. This will be a list of all the libraries that I’ll be using for the project, and these are sort of dependencies. These might be gtk, wxwidgets, or qt for gui, opengl or SDL for graphics, openal or some other audio library for audio, one particular library for networking, etc, etc. These might also include other details as extra libraries, dlls, per-platform specification, etc.

ALSO, we will have native access to files, operating system, etc, through a vast object oriented library, who’s code will work on all object oriented systems.

The first benifit of this is that there’s a program that downloads the latest versions of all the libraries, and their dependencies, and create a project for an ide of your choice, ready to compile with any supported compiler.

Now the hassle of getting the right libraries is removed, which is only the beginning, as the best part, and an excruciatingly hard part is to write object oriented wrappers for all of these. So for example if I have:

(note this is just a concept and not anyway related to the final code)

File music_file(“asastor.mp3â€); // FILE: is a wrapper class

Audio_Decoder decoder(music_file); // An audio decoder

Audio_Output output; // to output audio

decoder.play_with(output); // set the output module.

decoder.playfrom(“1:00â€) //play from 1 minute timestamp

Now, you say, sure, there are libraries that can do things like this, even if you present an oversimplified audio, graphics, networking and filesystem interface, there are ways to do this, but the best caveat will be this:

Suppose you are writing code for linux. You’ve set your gui engine to gtk. So instead of writing code for gtk, you write it like this:

Window new(“My windowâ€);

Button click_me(“Click Me!â€);

new.Attach(click_me);

Now suppose some code like this would attach a button to a window. While porting code from gtk to another gui engine like qt is painful, it’ll be as simple as setting a simple variable in your library collection file. Of course, the functionality will be lesser than all libraries, as certain features are there in qt that’s not there in gtk but while we cannot hack our way to replicate features, we’ll have to allow ability to add features directly from the libraries themselves.

This would enable to write code once, and have it run almost flawlessly anywhere. Taking what we already know about building good cross platform libraries, and the great many advancements in compiler and build tools, and the power to run an application natively using the blistering fast power of computers, rather than running it on top of some other layer. Moreover, with so many open source libraries with some really cool stuff from computer vision, to artificial intelligence, etc, allowing developers to easily install and use these libraries would be a great first step before encapsulating them classes.

If compelling enough reason exists to build this and enough support, I plan to build this over the next few years.

Over the past few years, I haven’t felt what it’s like for waiting for something to come out. Either I’d get something when I could, or it’d already be there when I wanted it. Sure I’ve waited for certain software releases, but with the advent of svn(and the liberty to compile your own software), and frequent release cycles, even that faded.

Now, I’m all tingled up in anticipation for Amon Amarth’s yet-unnamed album. This metal group from sweden rose up from humble origins to become one of the top metal acts in Europe, and the world today, and they do it with brilliant innovation, again and again. There’s no stopping these vikings whatsoever.

Their last album, “With Oden on our Sideâ€, was perhaps some of the best music I’ve ever heard in my life. Lyrics from the title song, “And with Oden on our side, we are victorious!†appears on my website’s subtitle. It’s infused with norse mythology, and speaks of the gods on our sides, when we go out to war. In that aspect, everyday is a war for everyone, and nothing beats the feeling of having Oden on your side.

I’m currently listening to “Fate of Nornsâ€, released in 2004. It has some amazing songs, including the brilliant riff of “An ancient sign of coming stormâ€, and of course “The pursuit of vikingsâ€

“Versus the worldâ€, their 2002 album is in my opinion, their second best. “Death in fire†is perhaps the best song to open with for any album. I love all the songs from the other albums, particularly “Friends of the suncrossâ€, which is really not what the name sounds like.

So anyways, they’ve got their new album coming out, and they say it’ll be great, and I have enough reason to trust these lovely people. They’re incredibly talented, creative, hard working and really take Viking and Norse mythology seriously. The album is still-untitled, and I can’t wait for it.

So here’s some well deserved advertising:

The last time I waited for an album was Linkin Park’s Meteora, of which’s release date coincided with the ending of my Class 10 Examination. Can’t say I’m proud, but what the hell! I’ve been waiting impatiently for six years to wait impatiently again.

I was trying to write a simple program for this problem:
Hashit at spoj.pl on code::blocks on a windows system using mingw compiler. Building a hash map was easy enough, though I hadn’t written one before, but when I had an vector > object, that became almost impossible to debug.

I remember using gdb to debug applications on linux at work, and that is useful enough, I don’t know why I’m not able to see why I can’t read the data in my vectors. Oh well, cout to the rescue.

Anyone know a good way to debug stl with gdb, and since I’m on windows the commandline version is just painful.