A fun little side project I've been working on to mess aroung with graphics in C++.
Specifically I am using a functional programming style as opposed to OOP. I started out using OOP but found it to be really annoying, and found this article written by John Carmack on the benefits of writing C++ code, especially multi-threaded game dev code, in a more functional style.
I recommend reading the entire article, but to keep it short, at the end he quips that it would be nice
if all of the object just referenced a read only version of the world state, and we copied over the updated version at the end of the frame.
So this is exactly what I do. Very easy for me to do/say as a single person writing in this codebase from scratch. Probably harder to do on a team, and maybe impossible to do on a professional level.
At first it was really annoying to have to construct entire new objects instead of simply surgically mutating the state that I needed to, but after running into a few logic errors I'm already seeing the benefits of this functional style. The logic for my collision wasn't working originally (the true's and false's were flipped) and since all my functions are pure I was able to write some unit tests very easily for the buildCollisionState function, and immediately found out the problem. There wasn't even a possibility that there was some weird threading/SFML stuff going on, I knew the issue had to be a logical one, due to the properties of pure functions. Very nice stuff. I can only imagine the benefits multiplying as the code becomes more complex.
This project uses CMake. You will have to install all of the SFML dev dependencies to get this to work, so good luck to you. You can find what they all are in the SFML documentation.
If you really want to run this for some reason, and you have installed all of the dozen or so dev dependencies, then you can do this to run it:
cd cpp-fun/build/
cmake ..
make
./cpp-fun
Or these to run the unit tests:
cd cpp-fun/build
cmake ..
make
./cpp-fun-tests