CJ50 utility library
This is a helper library for teaching programming using C.
The emphasis here is on teaching programming, not teaching C: C is being used because it is a relatively simple language that also allows talking about memory and bits, has an important place in history, and is practical for making simple video games (which young starting programmer doesn't fancy doing that?) that can also run in the browser via WASM.
The aim of the library is hence to provide for an as nice
introductionary programming experience as possible. It offers easy
ways to get input from and write output to the terminal, and (not yet
finished) 2D graphics output. It follows a Rust-inspired programming
style: Option, unwrap, drop, using type names with an upper-case
initial for complex types. It provides generic functions (via C11
_Generic) to avoid having to type out the fully named function
specializations everywhere. The makefile compiles with sanitizers to
catch undefined behaviour.
The name is derived from cs50.h which this library was originally inspired by.
Usage
This needs make, Clang and SDL2, as well as pandoc for generating the html files. In the current form it will probably only work on Linux or perhaps other Unix-like systems (commit 0594cb75a4 is known to work on MacOS). On Debian-derived systems, install the dependencies with:
sudo apt-get install make clang libsdl2-dev pandoc
For ease of use and updating, the Makefile can be used to build both the included examples and third party files but assumes that this library is checked out at ~/cdevelopment/cj50 (although alternatively you can set CJ50BASEDIR to the path of the checkout). Meaning, run the following to use this library:
cd
mkdir -p cdevelopment
cd cdevelopment
git clone https://github.com/pflanze/cj50
mkdir ownproject
cd ownproject
git init
ln -s ../cj50/Makefile
cp ../cj50/examples/basics.c .
make basics
./basics
# then write your own files and compile and use them:
$EDITOR myown.c
make myown
./myown
If you want to use make auto (which runs bin/auto-make), you need to install chj-scripts.
Documentation
The library files contain embedded documentation, which can be converted to Markdown and then html format via:
cd ~/cdevelopment/cj50
make doc
You can then open the file doc-output/index.html in your browser.
make doc simply uses the generated markdown files contained in the
repository. If you edit the documentation in the library files, you
need to run make gendoc instead to update the markdown files, but
that also requires the
FunctionalPerl Perl package
to be installed.
Bugs and Todo
See BUGS.