Experiences

April 01, 2008

approximately 1 minutes to read

Well, the semester break is nearly now, time to look back at the last half year. I tried and used quite a few new things this time (Tried and used means usually I wrote something non-trivial with it. After all, the following list is the sum of 6 months of programming ;) ):

Ported a fairly large project over to CMake (from MSVC++). Took me quite some time, but I became pretty familiar with CMake in exchange. The build process included lots of dependencies, pre- & post-build steps and various custom configuration points and didn’t work until 2.6 beta due to a bug in 2.4.8. Looking forward to use it in the future for more projects.
Some parallel programming with OpenMP and profiling with Intel VTune/Thread Profiler. Worked quite well actually, included reworking an algorithm for better scalability and implementing it.
Lots of Java programming: Wrote a compiler with it (from scratch) and some smaller side projects. It’s not as bad as it used to be (last time I used Java was around 1.2), but I fear I won’t love it anytime soon … except for the top-notch refactoring capabilities of Eclipse/Netbeans.
DirectX9, programming and debugging with PiX. Basically, the last several months I’ve been using DX9 and I must admit it’s a pretty comfortable development environment (at least, compared to OpenGL – PiX’ “debug this pixel” is just great).
Boost – I’ve learned how to get Boost running from SVN directly (during the time VC9 was not supported officially) and I had a chance to take a look at the new thread stuff. The latter is pretty interesting as it’s the same that will be part of C++0x, the earlier you take a look at it the better.

Update: Yeah, I know, the about page does not reflect this – I gotta update it some day, but I doubt I can ever keep it really up-to-date. Also note that this list is not really complete.