GCC, Clang and MSVC are powerful compilers, with many heuristics to emit the most efficient instructions, maybe even optimal ones. The same goes for ICC, a.k.a Intel’s compiler, well known for outranking all the others regarding the performance of the generated code. We rarely talk about it but it is…

As 2020 was finally coming to an end, I began listing the tools that came into my day-to-day work during this period, checking what I have learnt from them. Interested? Let’s see that together. Note: This is mostly a translation of my post on LinuxFR.org. …

Here’s a new game: pick a random software library and review it. A long time ago Mark Gillard posted in r/cpp a link to his C++ library to handle TOML, with a comment saying “As always, feedback welcome!”. Hey, good thing! I don’t know anything about TOML but I know…

Did you know that every day several new C++ signal-slot libraries are created? There are so many of them that we estimate there is 1.14 libraries for each C++ developer. Let’s have a look at them. The puma runs faster than a wardrobe The signal-slot mechanism is a way to implement the observer pattern. Roughly, the idea…

Let’s talk about build systems. Note: This is mostly a translation of my post on LinuxFR.org. If your native language is French or similar, you may as well read it there. My job is to program video games targeted to iOS and Android devices. The platform-specific sections are written in…

On the 6th of January, 2014, I joined IsCool Entertainment as a game developer on the recently released mobile game named Bazoo. It was a long time ago and the project went through a lot of phases. Let me tell you its story… [All illustrations courtesy of IsCool Entertainment.] The genesis The…

I have been watching the excellent talk “Writing Fast Code” by Andrei Alexandrescu with some colleagues recently. In this talk the speaker focuses on the low level optimizations and performance improvements of C++ code while emphasizing on the importance of measuring. This is a very pleasant technical talk. An astonishing…

Concluding the series of behaviors that will make us better developers, today we focus on the pleasure of making the project moving forward and on some suggestions of books and articles to read. We have seen in the previous article that we should retain the urge to add extra stuff…

Continuing in the series of behaviors that will make us better developers, today we talk about meeting our targets by doing exactly what have to be done, and nothing else. As time goes we all eventually code a feature telling ourself “I should refactor/write a tool so I would go…