Monthly Archives: August 2017

Playgrounds Revamped

“Play is the highest form of research.”
— Albert Einstein

Many years ago, I wrote about the importance of having playgrounds, that is, easy-to-access try-out areas for carrying out programming-related experiments with the overall goal of exploring and learning.

Recently, I’ve reworked my C++ playground and uploaded it to GitHub. Compared to my previous C++ playground, the new one comes with the following major advantages:

  1. Shared access to playgrounds from multiple computers — since it is based on a Git repository.
  2. Every experiment has its own subdirectory — the top-level playground directory stays clean and clearly arranged.
  3. Unit test support through Google Test — running ‘make’ not just builds the experiment but also executes contained unit tests.

Once cloned and installed, you can start a new experiment is this:

‘pg-setup’ will create a directory called ‘init_within_loop_body’ along with a ‘Makefile’ and a ‘init_within_loop_body.cpp’ source file. Plus, if you have defined your ‘EDITOR’ environment variable properly, it will open ‘init_within_loop_body.cpp’ in your favorite editor for you. All that’s left to do is add your experiment’s code to the testcase template:

Now, just type/execute ‘make’ (either from within your editor or from the command-line) and your code will be compiled and run: