More pleasant, non-political discussion: what are you working on (work/play)?

Haven't done one of these threads in a while. I always enjoy reading about what others are working on and sharing my own projects.

In my line of work (industrial automation), we have our hands tied hardware-wise because we have to use things that are UL-approved. I've been wanting to do some light signal processing using an embedded PC, but the UL-approved ones currently are way overpriced, and have limited/poor software support.

Siemens has come out with a UL-approved "IoT gateway" that is essentially an improved Intel Galileo SBC (uses Intel Quark processor, x86 but same instruction set as the very first Pentiums, P5x). Their business model is to leverage all the open-source software surrounding this, and they have also given a very reasonable price for their offering.

Seeing the potential of this product, I immediately pre-ordered one and am wetting myself waiting to compile/run everything I can on it. This doesn't seem big, but it is: existing UL-approved industrial devices are typically >$600 (more like >$900 actually) with either proprietary software or very limited support for an ancient image of Debian. This ships with Yocto Linux with kernel version 4.4 and will have all the open-source resources the Intel Galileo does, and is $260. Suddenly, I will be able to do a lot of things in a UL-approved form for a lot cheaper. Example: $1600 UL-approved router with VPN server? Nope, OpenWrt + this. $700 UL-approved wifi router? Nope, OpenWrt + mini-PCIe WLAN card + this.

This will be my work/play project for quite sometime. Pretty stoked.

I'm determined to learn C++ on Windows with nothing but the Visual Studio developer command prompt and NMake. Writing Makefiles on Windows feels wrong and right all at the same time. I've basically given up on Visual Studio and have instead downloaded Gedit.

I'm also going to say this to the horror of many posters here but at the command-line, Linux and Windows are shockingly similar. There's usually reasonable analogs for basic commands.

The Makefiles are so structurally similar enough that I anticipate maintaining two to not become an issue (just simple syntax updates, really).

And the best part is, I can eschew a lot of the MS cruft that rests on top. It also gives me better and much more direct access to the CUDA compiler.

That's cool. I had to deal with NMake for a little bit for two open-source projects I occasionally help out with, it was mostly painless. +1 to avoiding the MS IDE. Hated it every time I've had to touch it. Makefiles til I die. Or CMake.

CMake is a pretty great build tool as well. One thing I like about it on Windows is that it has a GUI right out of the box. It's a lot easier to digest when there's a menu just telling you to choose directories :P

Linux does too, cmake-qt-gui is the package name under Ubuntu at least.

Out of curiosity, what is wrong with the Visual Studio IDE? For C++ it seems pretty good. As a random example, in editing code I often write some code and then later decide I want to wrap it in a loop, a block, a lambda or something (something inside curlies):

Code:

---

/* { <-- Want to add this */
stmt;
stmt;
...
stmt;
/* } <-- And this */

---

In other editors, I would normally do the following:
1. Go to the top and add the statement with an opening brace.
2. Go to the bottom and add a closing brace.
3. Start selecting lines from the line directly above the closing brace and continue selecting upwards until the first opening brace that was created in step 1.
4. Choose the editor's "increase indent" command (e.g. >> in Vim or TAB in other editors).

With Visual Studio the editor sees what you want to do after step 2; steps 3 and 4 are done automatically.

Work:
Currently working new driver software for ELAN and other smaller projects. Deadlines are killing us.

Play:
Apart from re-decorating the house, working on bits of the game I spoke about. Currently we have a working title!
"Moorly Manor" :D

At home I'm working on a ncurses-based hex editor with support for structured data viewing, as part of my apprenticeship of C. Won't probably be finished. Or it might -- I need a decent linux hex editor.
At work we are currently only maintaining the code of two earlier projects.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by c99tutorial

Out of curiosity, what is wrong with the Visual Studio IDE? For C++ it seems pretty good. As a random example, in editing code I often write some code and then later decide I want to wrap it in a loop, a block, a lambda or something (something inside curlies):

Code:

---

/* { <-- Want to add this */
stmt;
stmt;
...
stmt;
/* } <-- And this */

---

In other editors, I would normally do the following:
1. Go to the top and add the statement with an opening brace.
2. Go to the bottom and add a closing brace.
3. Start selecting lines from the line directly above the closing brace and continue selecting upwards until the first opening brace that was created in step 1.
4. Choose the editor's "increase indent" command (e.g. >> in Vim or TAB in other editors).

With Visual Studio the editor sees what you want to do after step 2; steps 3 and 4 are done automatically.

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I'm not actually trying to troll either.

I did try Visual Studio. I think it's better for actual C++. I tried to figure out Nvidia's VS plugin thingy but I found the whole thing cumbersome and largely unintuitive. I think VS might be the kind of thing that you need to be taught by a fellow developer at work. I'm coding all this stuff at home. Plus, I've been experimenting with the Windows CLI and so far, it's actually been largely pleasant. Windows 10 has a decent command prompt.

The basics of the Visual Studio IDE can be grasped by anyone by looking at a simple tutorial. Create new project, build, debug. A lot of the other stuff is intuitive too, like profiling. You simply need to learn what's in there and that's the same for any IDE. It's not so complicated that you need hands-on from someone else. Go find a tutorial--there's bound to be plenty of them.

But keep in mind, you're faster with a UI than you are a terminal. I'm the exact opposite. I have amazing WPM because I used to play DotA and you can't play DotA without smack talking so you gotta be quick because you can't let it affect your gameplay.

I also enjoy that there even is a command line build option in Windows.

Note sure what DotA has to do with this.

Anyway, not defending Visual studio or any other IDE for that matter. Just defending the fact that you don't need to be taught by a fellow co-worker to understand it.

And I know something that's even better than command lines -- shortcuts! F7 to compile, F5 to debug, F11/F10 to step. Faster than your command line stuff even. Although I do sometimes use command line scripts to get work done faster than it is doing it in the GUI (*cough* git *cough*).

I'm also a little confused with what can possibly be wrong about the C++ build system in Visual Studio. It beats Microsoft's own NMake because you don't have to use it. Heck, for years I developed in C++ on VS with all sorts of libraries from boost, to GUI and scientific libraries and I can probably count from the fingers on one hand of an handicapped person the times I manually changed anything with NMake. Some of those where even multiproject workspaces.

CMake may be easier to you, because you are accustomed to it. And that is all. But it is in no way better than VS build system. If you aren't willing to learn new tools, new paradigms and new workflows, I wonder exactly what benefit you think you will get from having moved to Windows?

So, like I said, I'm confident VS is better for actual C++ and not my weird third party nonsense. Yes, they do have a NSight tool but I was having trouble importing existing code and then setting the compiler flags and overall, it doesn't seem as worth it. I don't know. I'm sure VS has utilities for importing Makefile projects so it's not like it'll affect a consumer of my code.

Edit:

Okay, I'm big enough to admit that I was being a dumb idiot.

You guys were 100% correct. I was just being stupid. I remembered that a coworker mentioned you can use the file explorer to drag and drop files into VS projects. Turns out, that works. Except it didn't automatically copy my `.cu` files over for some reason (not sure why). _But_ I was finally able to figure out how to use the dang thing and shockingly, my code compiled and run!

I can now proceed forward.

Thank you guys for talking some sense into me. I was being pretty stupid, actually.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Elysia

Note sure what DotA has to do with this.

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(Good) gamers have excellent abilities with the keyboard, e.g. one-handed non-primary hand typing. I am the same and use those skills with AutoCAD as well as programming. Keyboard > all.