Re: LLVM discussion
I was considering flex and bison when making my compiler comments. I do not know anyone who doesn't use those or a similar tool these days; there are advantages to recursive descent parsers, but they're a lot more work to write. Flex and bison probably aren't even the best thing on the block these days: compilers can be written in hgher-level languages, and there's a lot of other options. This is because those tools aren't just for copilers, even if that is their most common association. If you're trying to write a compiler without them, you've gone from hard to hell-in-life, or something we don't have an adjective for.
Even with flex and bison (or similar), the top companies in the world recruit the top computer science people in the world, pay them huge quantities of money, and throw them at a compiler. 5 or 6 years later, it's worth using.
I'll be completely honest. You can get a com
piler, in the sense of compiling hello world. This can happen around the same time you're ready to make your first audiogame. yay, you say! It compiles. But your work is only 1% done, because you're probably not anywhere near doing error messages right (VC++ has somewhere around a thousand), you're going to need an optimizer (usually a grad-level compiler course), reimplement all the tools (ever wanted to know everything about your processor? yeah, thought not. Too bad you need to implement a good debugger...). You'll be refactoring like crazy: you can compile the print statement, but even adding the function restructures the entire internals of the compiler, and hello there Mr. Class, fiend of the extra 3 weeks of recoding things. Or you could spend 4 or 5 hours learning to embed a scripting language or something of the like (I'm almost sure you can find a compiler for some language or other as a library.
; No telling which language, though). Quality compilers are hard. Really, really, bone-crunchingly hard. And that's not even talking about language design--if you're just copying another language, then use the other language; otherwise, you need to invent your own and most things that you can think of can and have already been done for you.
In terms of code in general? Comments are nice for new programmers, but the need of them lessens with programming skill; most big code-bases don't have them nearly as much as one would expect. The best thing you can do is establish and stick to style guidelines What you choose doesn't matter so much as being consistent: I should be able to tell if x is a function, variable, or whatever by lookinga t how you styled its name. personally (C++), I use underscores and lower case for global and class variables, camelcase with capital first letter for types, underscores and all-caps for
constants defined with macros, and camelcase with lower-case first letter for functions. I follow them draconically.
And here's the biggest one. The game engine is not the place for a new coder to contribute. The game engine must contain the best of the best in terms of features and code quality; it's not one game, it's hundreds, and any flaws are going to affect orders of magnitude more people. This is probably the hardest part of the whole thing.
I can be more focused once you give me what I'm asking for: a description of why Mr. Bob Smith cares.
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