Old C++ Templates vs Modern C++ Templates

"Simplicity boils down to two steps: identify the essential, eliminate the rest." – Leo Babauta https://leobabauta.com/ Introduction Early C++ templates behaved like a loosely defined macro‑based code generator. Modern C++20 and beyond templates are a constrained compile‑time language with predictable behavior, readable diagnostics, and

CMake for Windows: A Concrete Protobuf Example in C++

On Windows for my version of CMake the find_package searches this folder: C:\Program Files\CMake\share\cmake-4.2\Modules This is where the CMake Protobuf definitions are!

Git Stashing

“A big stash allows me to have a fluid sense of creativity - a looseness that is very much like playing. It opens me up, unlocks things. The creative bit takes all the other pieces - the possibility, the abundance, the connections, and the actual work of making yarn - bundles them, and

CMake Introduction

"By dint of building well, you get to be a good architect." – Aristotle I have been using CMake since about 2008 for many of my C++ projects. I highly recommend it for cross-platform development. It can generate Makefiles, but for the last few years it has expanded

Advanced GNU Make

Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning. -- Winston Churchill Photo by "My Life Through A Lens" on Unsplash GNU Make is often included within a complex ecosystem of Integrated Development Environments, build systems (such as boost.build, CMake, ninja, SCons, and/or waf), and compilers. Some

GNU Make

Introduction GNU Make is a common tool for creating software among Linux developers. Other build systems include waf, cmake, autoconf, and ninja. A list of build systems can be found on Wikipedia. Advantages to using Make include: * It has been around a long time. As such, it is on most

WSL: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8

“I don’t doubt at all that virtualization is useful in some areas. What I doubt rather strongly is that it will ever have the kind of impact that the people involved in virtualization want it to have.” — Linus Torvalds per quotefancy.com This article would not be possible without

Git SSH Keys for Windows and WSL

“A very little key will open a very heavy door.” - Charles Dickens Thanks a lot to Joshua Mitchell for reviewing and correcting this article! And thanks to my wife Evie who edits most of the content of all of my articles! Among the more common questions I get is about

Docker Volumes for Persistent Storage

“Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.”  – William_Ellery_Channing Docker containers and images are all well and good for things like isolation, consistency, and relatively straightforward scalability. But what if we have a need to remember things between container runs such as populating a

Network Sockets in C++

“The abstract kills, the concrete saves.” ― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath This is part of a series of posts on Network Sockets. Last time we covered sockets in general. Today’s tutorial will focus on the process of creating a Network socket between a single machine on

Network Sockets

“The network is the computer.” - Scott McNealy This page is a basic introduction to network socket programming in general. Network Socket Definition According to Wikipedia a network socket – hereafter sometimes simplified as only “socket” - is defined as: A network socket is a software structure within a network node of a

Rewriting History: git interactive rebase

By its very nature, history is always a one-sided account. Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code Before committing that final version of your pull or merge request, it is often useful to know how to use a feature of git called interactive rebasing. According to the documentation, rebasing is