jheruty

I experimented with hot-reloadable C++ a while back. https://github.com/jheruty/hscpp.git

Video for how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjGngeKgni8

To migrate from one class version to another, I found the easiest way was to provide a callback method in the constructor where one could save the state from the old class, and read it into the new class. For example: https://github.com/jheruty/hscpp/blob/master/examples/simple...

Ultimately though the limitations of hot-swapping this way limits its usefulness. My understanding is that liveplusplus is much more full-featured.

There is https://github.com/RuntimeCompiledCPlusPlus/RuntimeCompiledC...

The idea is to use virtual functions, and recompile new classes into a shared library. The shared lib is linked into the running program, and old instances of the classes are deleted and replaced by new instances constructed from the shared library.

I am working on a library called hscpp using the same (stolen) idea here:

https://github.com/jheruty/hscpp

Proof of concept demo:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pjGngeKgni8

hscpp is still very alpha, and I’m sure I’ll find lots of bugs as I work on a “real” demo. In contrast, Runtime Compiled C++ is quite mature and is used in real game projects.

Note that this approach very much limits your architecture. For example, you won’t be able to use statics, as the newly compiled shared libraries won’t see them.

It’s a finicky thing, worth it to me, but not something you can just plop in to an established project.

In my experience, "display: table" is not really identical to the behavior of <table>. I gave up on it for my project, though unfortunately I don't remember the specifics.

I think it's just a fundamental issue where CSS is trying to be both layout and style. Works great for basic document formatting, but once you try to do something complex, it all falls apart. Or, rather, it should fall apart, but we've spent the last couple decades duct taping it together.

Every JavaScript framework ultimately hits a wall where it has to interact with CSS. It can't be abstracted away.

I really do believe more money and effort should be spent looking for an alternative.

I'll bite.

I'm not a fan of CSS. I learned it well enough to build a decent UI toolkit (draggable modals, collapsible, etc.)

I hate how CSS tries to mix layout and style. A million articles about not using tables for layout, and it took 20+ years to get a grid. I tried to do some fancy text and element alignment with CSS, and it was not having it (and, yes, I know about display: table). In the end I reverted to a table. It worked, and I moved on with life.

It is ridiculously hard to draw things in absolute positions. In many cases, it is easier to do a tiny bit of math and compute the positions of objects, rather than have to define parent/child relationships. But for true absolute positioning, you have to throw divs into a "portal" of some sort, and move that object into the root element. This makes doing things like pretty drag and drop extremely painful.

Browsers are buggy as hell, and often something works on everything but [insert your most hated browser]. That's a hint that the spec is too complicated.

I agree with your assessment, in that if you try to construct the world from scratch, you'll be "fighting the beast the whole way." I disagree that this is positive quality of the thing.

I've got a Kinesis Advantage II, so one of those several hundred dollar types.

I know it's "just a tool", but I can't help but feel a connection to it, like people often feel for their vehicle. I think back to the things I built with it the same way one might reminisce about that one great road trip. Keyboards are the bridge between the physical and virtual realms. I understand the desire to have one that's truly your own.

In my case, I needed to know whether or not a member exists in order to implement object tracking. I basically have a macro that inserts a member into a class, and calls that member's constructor with the "this" pointer of the tracked class. A different function needs to know, at compile time, whether or not a class is tracked, as the way memory is allocated differs.

I didn't want to use inheritance, as tracking is disabled in a shipped build, and I want it to have as little effect on the codebase as possible. So, the simplest option seemed to be to check whether or not the member exists (and assume the name is unique enough an untracked object will not contain it). This was good enough for my purposes.

I'm not as familiar with C#, but attributes seems like a potential alternative, though I'm not sure they can be fully removed from a release build. And, of course, C# is garbage collected, which is not ideal for all types of software. If there is a better alternative, I'd be interested in hearing it though!

Don't get me wrong, I'd absolutely love a "better" C++. Rust is a great language, but I personally don't feel that the safety guarantees are worth it for every class of software. If a video game crashes, the world isn't going to end.

C++ templates can indeed get crazy, but I miss them in every other language I use. For example, I recently wrote some code in which I needed to know whether or not a member existed in a class, at compile time. Turns out, there's a way to do that in C++ using templates and overload rules:

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/More_C++_Idioms/Member_Detecto...

Yes, conceptually it's a bit nuts, but the fact that you can do stuff like this makes it unlikely that you'll ever get completely stuck trying to implement something.

I personally love C++ because it's just a giant bag of tools, even if one of those tools is a footgun.