Been using VS2010 express. Writing in C# which i figured was a good middle step towards object oriented languages. One thing that has made my code somewhat repetitive is the inability to use multiple class inheritance in C#. I.e. I can't say class A inherits from class B and class C.
c# is great because you can quickly and easily get windows with buttons textboxes and dials up and running. This is not available in C++ in the express version since the MFC libraries are not included.
Now, I have thought of just desinging a C# front end which saves parameters to a file then execute a c++ which reads the file, runs and then saves a file which i open with another(or the same) c# backend exec to read and play ard with the results. But this would make it cumbersome always executing the whole sequence again if you want to change something. Not to mention debugging, will probably need to have to instances running.
Reading on of the Visual studio 2012 Express for desktop announcment, it stated that "You can also combine C++, C#, and Visual Basic projects into a single solution, making it easy to write a single application using any of the available languages." http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/09/12/visual-studio-express-2012-for-windows-desktop-is-here.aspx?PageIndex=3
Now I would be happy with that, after all I dont expect and dont need at this stage to do any wizbank stuff i.e special button functionality/design which is easier and provided with the MFC in C++.
My question is: Has anyone tried this in Visual Studio 2012 in the Express for windows desktop version in Windows 7''? I.e can you combine a c++ and a c# projects which interact, trace the code form one project to another when debugging for example? Are there any special restrictions? I mean if its combining executables only its not much use, but i expect its more than that, but how much more? For example, can an object designed in C# instanciate an object designed in c++ pass it a reference to other objects like classes which hold inputs and outputs or data which are proccessed in the c++ class and still accesible in the c# code to display results etc?
I am asking this before downloading the new express version because I expect it will set me back a couple of months since going from C# to C++ i would think is like going from Visual Basic to C. I wouldnt want to get into all the trouble (i dont mind really but it would be huge step back) to find out i cant "seemlesly" integrate a c# front end with a C++ proccesing solution.
You have three options for interfacing C++ with C#:
pinvoke: You specify function signatures in C# and give them an attribute specifying what DLL they reside in. This is fairly painful to do if you need to pass around any complex types at all.
COM: A C++ DLL would implement a COM object called by the C# code.
C++/CLI: Allows mixing of managed and unmanaged C++ code in a single C++ project. It is very nice for interfacing with other libraries but, in VS 2010 at least, lacks helpful features such as intellisense. If you really wanted to go this route, I would write three projects: Your core C++ code as a static library, your C++/CLI DLL to wrap it, and your C# application.
I'm working on a wrapper to compile c++ code having MFC and windows API calls into their linux versions.
The c++ code has the following characteristics:
No GUI component present.
Has a maximum of about 10 MFC classes used mostly for string parsing.
It has lots of windows specific constants used such as HINSTANCE, LPCTSTR and so on.
I'm not allowed to compile using wine in linux. Till now i've come across wxwidgets, it seems quite vast, i doubt if i'll be needing all it's components.
Please share your ideas in creating the wrapper, is there any specific code that is already available which does this task or part of this task ?
There is no automatic or even semi-automatic way to convert an MFC application to wxWidgets. It is, of course, perfectly possible to do it and many, many projects have gone through this transformation but you just need to do it.
See MFC page of wxWiki for some starting points.
In Ocaml, is there easier ways to write a graphics-based toy programs like deminer (like the one that comes with Windows 95)? I find the only way is to start by scratch using Ocaml's graphics library. There must be better ways around?
There are bindings to the SDL library, that provides more features than Graphics.
There are actually several of them, and I'm not exactly sure which is best:
SdlCaml is a part of the [GLcaml] project
the OcamlSDL library
I think SdlCaml is more bare metal (probably partly automatically generated), and OCamlSDL is an older (but still occasionally updated) library with a larger user base.
Note however that Graphics is simple to use for a start, and you can still move to something more sophisticated later. If you run into speed-of-rendering issues, you have to use double buffering, as explained in the manual.
I'm newbie to haskell.
while wxFreeChart page in wxCode says it supports all wx ports, I have no any idea about how to use it in haskell
It's a C++ library, so you'd have to bind it yourself if you want to use it from Haskell; this is unlikely to be practical, as binding C++ libraries to Haskell is a difficult task. (Indeed, wxHaskell itself is based on a custom "binding" of wxWidgets to pure C.)
You should probably figure out another way to accomplish the same task, or if you really need to use wxFreeChart, write your GUI directly in C++. You could still use Haskell for the core logic using the FFI.
wxWidgets ports aren't relevant here; they're the parts that glue wxWidgets to a windowing system like Windows, GTK+, etc.
If you're not overly tied to wxWidgets, you could check out the Chart library, which can be used with Gtk2Hs. I haven't used it myself, but it seems quite polished.
I'm an author of wxFreeChart. Under "All ports" i meant, Windows, MacOS X, Gtk+, Universal ports.
wxHaskell is not directly supported, and there are no plans to support it. If wxFreeChart will work with wxHaskell, it's great. But, i'm not sure about it.
So, I got this idea that I'd try to prototype an experimental user interface using OpenGL and some physics. I know little about either of the topics, but am pretty experienced with programming languages such as C++, Java and C#. After some initial research, I decided on using Python (with Eclipse/PyDev) and Qt, both new to me, and now have four different topics to learn more or less simultaneously.
I've gotten quite far with both OpenGL and Python, but while Python and its ecosystem initially seemed perfect for the task, I've now discovered some serious drawbacks. Bad API documentation and lacking code completion (due to dynamic typing), having to import every module I use in every other module gets tedious when having one class per module, having to select the correct module to run the program, and having to wait 30 seconds for the program to start and obscure the IDE before being notified of many obvious typos and other mistakes. It gets really annoying really fast. Quite frankly, i don't get what all the fuzz is about. Lambda functions, list comprehensions etc. are nice and all, but there's certainly more important things.
So, unless anyone can resolve at least some of these annoyances, Python is out. C++ is out as well, for obvious reasons, and C# is out, mainly for lack of portability. This leaves Java and JOGL as an attractive option, but I'm also curious about Ruby and Groovy. I'd like your opinion on these and others though, to keep my from making the same mistake again.
The requirements are:
Keeping the hell out of my way.
Good code completion. Complete method signatures, including data types and parameter names.
Good OpenGL support.
Qt support is preferable.
Object Oriented
Suitable for RAD, prototyping
Cross-platform
Preferably Open-Source, but at least free.
It seems you aren't mainly having a problem with Python itself, but instead with the IDE.
"Bad API documentation"
To what API? Python itself, Qt or some other library you are using?
"lacking code completion (due to dynamic typing)"
As long as you are not doing anything magic, I find that PyDev is pretty darn good at figuring these things out. If it gets lost, you can always typehint by doing:
assert isinstance(myObj, MyClass)
Then, PyDev will provide you with code completion even if myObj comes from a dynamic context.
"having to import every module I use in every other module gets tedious when having one class per module"
Install PyDev Extensions, it has auto-import on the fly. Or collect all your imports in a separate module and do:
from mymodulewithallimports import *
"having to select the correct module to run the program"
In Eclipse, you can set up a default startup file, or just check "use last run configuration". Then you never have to select it again.
"before being notified of many obvious typos and other mistakes"
Install PyDev Extensions, it has more advanced syntax checking and will happily notify you about unused imports/variables, uninitialized variables etc.
Looking just at your list I'd recommend C++; especially because Code Completion is so important to you.
About Python: Although I have few experience with OpenGL programming with Python (used C++ for that), the Python community offers a number of interesting modules for OpenGL development: pyopengl, pyglew, pygpu; just to name a few.
BTW, your import issue can be resolved easily by importing the modules in the __init__.py files of the directory the modules are contained in and then just importing the "parent" module. This is not recommended but nonetheless possible.
I don't understand why nobody has heard of the D programing language?
THIS IS THE PERFECT SOLUTION!!!!
The only real alternative if you desire all those things is to use Java, but honestly you're being a bit picky about features. Is code completion really that important a trait? Everything else you've listed is traditionally very well regarded with Python, so I don't see the issue.
The text editor (not even an IDE) which I use lets you import API function definitions. Code completion is not a language feature, especially with OpenGL. Just type gl[Ctrl+I] and you'd get the options.
I tried using Java3D and java once. I realized Java3D is a typical Java API... lots of objects to do simple things, and because it's Java, that translates to a lot of code. I then moved to Jython in Eclipse to which cleaned up the code, leaving me with only the complexity of Java3D.
So in the end, I went in the opposite direction. One advantage this has over pure python is I can use Java with all of Eclipse's benefits like autocomplete and move it over to python when parts get unwieldy in Java.
It seems like Pydev can offer code completion for you in Eclipse.
I started off doing OpenGL programming with GL4Java, which got migrated to JOGL and you should definately give it (JOGL) a try. Java offers most of the features you require (plus Eclipse gives you the code completion) and especially for JOGL there are a lot of tutorials out there to get you started.
Consider Boo -- it has many of Python's advantages while adopting features from elsewhere as well, and its compile-time type inference (when variables are neither explicitly given a specific type or explicitly duck typed) allows the kind of autocompletion support you're asking about.
The Tao.OpenGL library exposes OpenGL to .NET apps (such as those Boo compiles), with explicit support for Mono.
(Personally, I'm mostly a Python developer when not doing C or Java, but couldn't care less about autocompletion... but hey, it's your question; also, the one-class-per-module convention seems like a ridiculous amount of pain you're putting yourself through needlessly).