I've been refactoring my game engine code lately to abstract the physics-related code so that I avoid having to deal with Bullet directly. I've also started working towards my first game. I'm currently happy with the codebase I have, so diving into a game will really show me whether or not my design decisions were good or bad. If the latter, then I get a chance to refactor and learn from my mistakes.
Another thing I've decided is that the "experimental" C++0x stuff in GCC is awesome, and I've been modifying my code to use some of the useful stuff it offers. Initializer lists really made certain parts of my code look much nicer because I get to avoid dealing with boost::array and/or std::vector when dealing with static data. Whenever appropriate, I plan on taking advantage of the new auto keyword to make code shorter and more concise; No longer will I have to write things like std::vector<sometype>::const_iterator (or even have to typedef them!). There's a bunch of other small things that are cool too, like "raw" strings, smart pointers, variadic templates, rvalue references + move semantics, a null pointer constant, fixes for the "double bracket" issue with templated types, a foreach loop, and so on!
Perhaps one of the things I'm super excited for, though, are the lambda functions. Alas, I have to wait for GCC 4.5 to enter the world of stable releases before I can use them. Nevertheless, I installed the prerelease to play around with them some. I think a lot of these C++0x features are really going to make C++ code far more concise, almost like [some things] in Python. Here's my attempt at writing a simple "list comprehension" that writes the squares of the numbers from 1 to 10:
#include <iostream>
#include <algorithm>
#include <iterator>
int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
int i = 1;
int data[10] = {};
std::generate(
data, data + 10,
[&i]() -> int { return (i * i++); });
std::copy(
data, data + 10,
std::ostream_iterator<int>(std::cout, " "));
std::cout << std::endl;
return 0;
}I don't know about any of you, but I think that's about as concise as one is going to get in a language like C++. I'm looking forward to playing around with these lambdas for my simple event processing functions that are registered with my engine's windowing system. All I ask is that the C++0x standard doesn't change dramatically between now and its official "release".
Anyways, I actually pulled an all-nighter last night (no reason in particular), hence the title of this post. Off I go to enjoy some amazing sleep.
