Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: Reelya on October 22, 2016, 03:16:02 pm

It's better to write your own structure that has an interface similar to std:: stuff. It's tons more compact and efficient. It's good practice to make your own String class that is a replacement for std::string. It saves memory too.

Eh, string seems like one of the worse types to do this for. Strings have a *ton* of functionality and they're used a *lot*.

I'd much rather have the extremely reliable STL for something like that, even if it's a little slower. It's better than having bugs.

You would think so, but you would be wrong. And after you got tons of bugs from using std::string, you would realize it's actually not able to do a lot of what you need it to. Unicode for example, which will be a !!HUGE!! issue for any international support. UTF-8 is probably the most common solution, but several parts of the std library just plain do not support variable-length character encodings.

This means things work in many cases (because UTF-8 was designed in such a way to prevent problems with naive handling), but that really filthy things can be done which may screw you over. For example, incrementing a std::string iterator or otherwise by 1 will not always get you the next character. It will get you the next byte, but with the variable-length encoding, that may still be part of the first character. So if, for example, you wanted to send your strings in limitted size packets over some IO device like a network then print them out immediately on the far side, some of your characters would get mangled into garbage because they were missing the following bytes. (Source: been there, debugged that.) And believe me, an odd off by one in your custom string class is way easier to diagnose and fix than a bug that mysteriously appears only on a foreign language VM with your software that you otherwise wouldn't want to use for testing.

Additionally, you can use the structure of UTF-8 to actually help you recognize bugs elsewhere in your system by implementing a good string class! See, UTF-8 has a specific pattern to the encoding bits such that certain sequences are invalid. By throwing an assert in common use when it sees invalid UTF-8, you can detect memory stomps and other bad data getting into a string's memory in your program automatically whenever it is used, without any additional cost. This has alerted us to numerous subtle bugs in our code. It even detected an otherwise silent multithreaded stack corruption bug caused by a callback going rogue.

I personally spent about a month debugging various string issues in a project that (was required by interfaces to) use a mix of wide characters, UTF8 and typical strings, with a bunch more bugs of that nature in the pipeline. I then spent a month writing a new string class and replacing the old uses of strings, most of which was refactoring thousands of uses in the code base. After the rewrite, there were a grand total of 2 non-trivial bugs in the implementation, both of which were fixed in short order, the backlog of string related bugs magically disappeared, and it alerted us to a memory stomp bug by the end of the month.


In conclusion: I'm not saying std stuff is always bad. What I am saying is it is often missing some detail of context in which you want to use it that makes your life awful if you don't write your own. This could be international string support, this could be serializing data for a network, or it could simply be a lack of ability to easily modify the internal algorithm to optimizing for your particular use case. If you do it right, congratulations, you never need to do it again because you now have your string class or your array class, which has been tested by your projects and whose internals you can modify and are familiar with. The convenience and flexibility this affords you is far too often underestimated.

I'd still say even if we could trust the word of the government that the hacking is Russia's doing, I honestly think they're doing us a favor. If our politicians are so security lax, and so openly corrupt as to put their plans in writing. They need to be exposed. They need to have it proven to them that what they're doing is wrong on every level and needs to stop.

And what if what they're doing isn't wrong? What if all there is to find is risotto recipes? And what if that isn't good enough for the perpetrators of the criminal hackings? See, here's the thing: there have been modifications made to "leaked" files. Doing so is easy and can trivially be done without a trace.

"Evidence" from Putin is no more reliable than "evidence" from a random internet troll with an agenda. Believing information from such leaks is as suspect as believing whole-hog a tale spun by any other internet conspiracy monger. All it takes is slipping in false evidence of some act of debauchery and morons who see the word leak take it as gospel and will spread it like wildfire. It doesn't matter if it gets debunked, because it's been shown most people don't care. Emails about Clinton funneling billions into a Caribbean slush fund could be invented and leaked tomorrow. Emails about underage orgies. Emails about taking bribes. Just slip them into a batch of "leaked" information a week before the election, and it's done. And you would believe every word of it.

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Name: Using a verb for a name...? It's not the end of the world but it just seems odd to me.

Switch is also a noun. Has been for a long, long time. Light switch, that thing with railroads, the thin branches et al probably best known as a corporal punishment tool. Apparently some kind of hair thing, too.

I got the impression the thing is named after the action of switching between traditional and portable modes, not so much a lever. I guess you could argue that it is a switch in that sense that, like a switch, it can have multiple different states.
Still think it's kinda strange, and what about acronyms? NS? I prefer NX because the X can kinda represent switching, especially if you view the X as a 'cross' instead of the letter X.

In regards to Zelda, it's something I'll pick up if I do end up getting the Switch, but it's not a system seller like Monster Hunter is for me.

Clearly it is called switch because it has a more powerful dom mode and a less powerful sub mode.

Also, lots of games. With both Unreal and Unity, it's going to be quite the system. http://www.polygon.com/2016/10/20/13345516/nintendo-switch-activision-ea-bethesda

I will keep you in suspence- Donald Trump, on the question of whenever he will accept Hillary as POTUS.

Yeah he's calling for revolution come November 9th.

More specifically, asked if he would accept the results of the election. The only alternative to this is corpses in the streets.

What, and give up the perfectly good term of Sexit?

Given Trump still has over 42% support nationwide, you need to seriously gerrymander the republican party to say anywhere near half don't support him.

Honestly I have no idea how wind has this unnatural great reputation.

But hopefully people are a bit more realistic now that people are actually trying wind...

Basically when they started doing a serious wind power initiative they thought it was "silent" (like it was a pinwheel) but wind generators produce a lot of noise, break catastrophically, and require regular maintenance... So lets just say a lot of people were annoyed when they found they were 400 feet from one.

You seem to be very anti-wind, and I can't figure out why. At typical distances, they're quieter than an AC unit or fridge ( http://www.gereports.com/post/92442325225/how-loud-is-a-wind-turbine/ ), and are generally placed in the middle of farm fields or similar sparsely populated areas, where they're basically disrupting nothing.

It's also incredibly generous to nuclear to allow them to assume an extremely long payback period when the cost of solar and wind is dropping so fast.  It's like trying to justify buying a super expensive PC by saying that you are going to keep using it for ten years.  Sure you could keep it running for ten years but that is just not economically sensible when way cheaper computers will deliver the same performance in three years.

If we start planning a nuclear plant today and things go smoothly it might open by 2025.  By 2025 solar and wind will be flooding the market with electricity at half the price of electricity today.  Yes there will be timing issues but the markets can still make use of that electricity and demand smoothing is a real thing.  So nuclear power construction is based on an assumption about price that wont be real by the time it's done.  And a few years later the price will keep going on.  If in 2035 the price of electricity is down at 2 cents a kilowatt and you can't even cover your operating costs.  And then taxpayers get to pick up a multi-billion dollar bill for a plant that took longer to build then it ran for.

This is why there is no new nuclear and will never be new nuclear again.
Big banking investment groups have essentially put out warning saying "Investing in big long term electricity projects is a really bad idea right now because renewable prices are dropping so fast that many of them will be non-viable within 10 years and you will be left holding the bag."
Take Max's aforementioned 5-7 years, for example. Based on the rate at which solar PV costs have fallen, if you started construction on a nuclear plant today, somehow magicking away all opposition and schedule overruns, by the time it was turned on, solar energy would cost half as much as it does today. These plants are then meant to last 50 years or so to recuperate costs enough to be economically viable.

As far as I can tell, wind and solar are already competitive with nuclear, or will be within that range of 5-7 years. As such, building new nuclear, assuming shovels put into the dirt today, is a terrible, money losing proposition.