Sample Code

Author

Scott Bailey

Why this code?

This bit of code I have hanging around that has some real world utility. I've used something like it to accumulate inbound data from various interfaces many times over the years.

In usage, our application might consume serial, TCP, or other streamed data. This accumulator allows us to easily peek at the data using iterators or the array operator as though it were a contiguous memory block. We might do this to search for unique header indicators or test checksums. We can then pop the bytes out of the accumulator and use or discard them as determined by prior tests.

CMake

CMake is useful. It's a solid choice for ensuring source can build just about anywhere. And CPM makes dependency managmenent simple and repeatable.

Benchmark

You can't tell if something is efficient without benchmarking. Google's benchmark seems pretty good for this purpose.

Boost

Boost is a great place to find libraries you might want to use but don't yet exist in the standard library. In this example, we look at the performance of std::deque, boost::container::devector, and boost::circular_buffer_space_optimized as internal containers for accumulator.

Spoiler: on my system, deque executes in about 6% more time than devector for this toy benchmark. And circular_buffer_space_optimized yielded 20% more time cost than deque! An implementation that also supported std::vector as the internal container might provide an intersting comparison as well.

Build and Test

This is one option. It works in Linux.

mkdir Build \
 && cd Build \
 && cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
 && cmake --build . \
 && ctest

For Windows, you might do the following in a gitbash window:

mkdir Build
cd Build
cmake ..
cmake --build .
ctest -C Debug

ScottBailey / sample