sutton050

I've just had myself into a complete frazzle, code yesterday was fast, rendering 120fps, the same code today was struggling to pass 11fps.  And it had me pulling my hair out, of which I have little left to spare. The problem? I had been processing strings for specific patterns and only replacing them, so a variable in my engine might have the value "SCORE" and it'd replace the players score value directly into the std::string instance for display. I however decided I wanted to compound all these reserved words to allow any value to contain any replaced value and also contain formatting, so I could so something like "You have scored %SCORE% today" and it'd just place the number in place. I turned to boost for this, boost::replace_all, to be specific, and I had about 45 pattern matches which would try to replace any instance of the string in place. However, this function does not look a head if the predicate is present in the source string, it's in fac...

One sore lesson to teach some developers is when to trust the compiler, once you've gotten that across you have to start teaching folks to stop re-inventing the wheel. If someone has already implemented a file handler, or a serial port abstraction, or a wrapper for some obscure feature, you need to evaluate that offering... To evaluate whether a library is worth using, firstly see if it works, then see how many folks actually use it, the more that use it then the more likely bugs will be flushed out and the whole thing has been tested. Leveraging this kind of mature code within your projects assists in bootstrapping the startup phase of new projects. Boost is a note worthy example of what I'm talking about here, many software shops (at least the ones I know) resist using open-source or third party libraries, they prefer to stick to in-house developed niche implementations until the very last moment, this of course slows development and completely symies innovation. Boost howeve...