Pepper

What it is

• Pepper is an engine to develop and prototype things quick in a sandbox environment

To clone the repo with submodules at the recorded commit hashes in the repo

git clone --recurse-submodules git@github.com:auxeon/Pepper.git

To clone the repo and update submodules

git clone --recurse-submodules --remote-submodules git@github.com:auxeon/Pepper.git

C++ steps

To run c++ code

buck2 run //:app

To test c++ code

buck2 test //:test

Key principles behind this project

• object oriented doesn't scale well - when the volume of data increases, using a data driven design with separate data and methods that act on that data is vastly easier to maintain scale and less error prone - this is why using C which prohibits the bells and whistles of object orientation makes sense. just focus on the methods.
• the goal with this engine is to develop a single source file engine that has all the most essential functionality needed to start showing stuff on screen and building apps if needed.
• this seeks to a rapid easy to use and fast sandbox prototyping engine.

Why C

• this engine is based on C99 primarily because it has all the simplicity and expressiveness of C.
• it also has a few added benefits of inline functions.
• variadic macros.
• new types like bool, complex etc..
• the key idea is to use the simplest tools available for the job but not any simpler than that whilst still maintaining a good level of abstraction.
• there is an intent to add functionality for multiple platforms so C makes the most sense if i want things to be portable.
• C++ has a lot of bells and whistles and most importantly stl - but this also has a downside that executable sizes are bigger and even though it is a zero overhead abstraction philosophy - you're using something that is way too over engineered and bulky for the task you want to accomplish.
• stl is beautiful since it has a very sound mathematical foundation - but i find over reliance on it takes away from the learning aspect.
• something that I find really interesting is that using the (C++) clang++ v12.0.0 compiler with -O3 level optimization turned on produces a smaller executable than (C) clang v12.0.0

naming convention

• all files that are part of the engine fall under the pepper_space so files have a format like ps_[filename]
• functions are similarly named with the ps_[functionname] format
• variables are named sensibly to be more decriptive of what they do
• macros that act in a functionesque sense are named with the ps_[macroname] style