Month: April 2018

Five examples for avoiding the preprocessor

Posted on by Marius Bancila

The C++ preprocessor is a text replacement tool used to transform the source code in order to produce a single text file that is then passed to the actual compiler. It has various capabilities, such as including files, conditional compilation, text macro replacement, error emitting, stringizing, or token concatenation. Often developers use the preprocessor when other alternatives are available and are more appropriate. In this article, I will show five examples of when and how you can avoid the use of the preprocessor.

Changing the color schemes of your development tools

Posted on by Marius Bancila

The tools I use the most as a developer include the command prompt, notepad, Visual Studio, and Total Commander. The trouble is, I don’t really like the default colors they come with. However, some of them can be customized with different color schemes. Some very popular color schemes are Solarized and OneHalf, both having a light and a dark version. In this article, I will show how to enable Solarized for them.

Parsing command line arguments in C++ with Clara

Posted on by Marius Bancila

In a previous post, I wrote about the C++ unit-testing framework Catch2. Catch uses another library, called Clara, for parsing command line arguments. Clara is an open-source, single-header, simple, composable and easy to use parser written by the author of Catch2. In this post, I will show how you can use Clara in C++ to parse command line arguments.