C++: the Named Parameter Idiom

Some times you will have a large C++ class with many parameters that need initializing. That can lead to some ugly constructor calls: auto popsim = PopulationSim(1000, 100000, 1000, 1000, 1500, 0.17, 0.05, 32, 3, 1, 7, 1); This makes the code very hard to maintain and debug, as there is no easy way to

Lecture summary: Programming Techniques for Scientific Simulations

During the autumn semester of 2017 I took the course “Programming Techniques for Scientific Simulations” as part of my BSc course in Computational Science and engineering at ETH Zürich. This is a summary of the course’s contents I wrote and used during the actual exam. Some things are missing, as it was an open-book exam

Compiling C++ libraries

If you use C++, you’ve almost certainly already used a library of some kind. Even the classic “Hello world” program requires one: #include <iostream> // include the iostream library int main() { std::cout << “Hello world!”; return 0; } But what if we wanted to write our own? This has several advantages. First off, if