Support library: Amalgamation of indispensable idioms.

This is a collection of self-developed utility functions/classes/etc I've developed over the 10+ years I've been writing C and C++. Many of the included items are nothing new, while I've found others quite useful (or perhaps too useful) in day-to-day programming.

If you had absolutely nothing better to do, you could probably trace the development of many of my current programming practices and habits through the code in this repository. And on that note, keep in mind that some files contained herein are used more than others.

So, in short, this repository exists primarily for your amusement/to prove how clever the author is. Enjoy!

TimeUtil

include/support/timeutil.h, for instance, provides a microsecond-granularity stopwatch utility with a dead-simple macro-based interface.

void my_function() {
  timeutil_init_mark_variables();  /* Declares and initializes the stopwatch data structure. */ 

  /* ... */

  timeutil_begin("Doing something"); /* Writes "-- Doing something... " to stderr. */
  do_something();

  timeutil_end(); /* Writes "done: (N) microseconds elapsed\n" to stderr, with (N) replaced
				     with... you get it. */

  /* ... */
}

All timeutil macros have been carefully written to avoid including the time taken by their own I/O calls.

There are additional macros that can be used to customize the type and content of messages printed by timeutil; see the header file for full details.

Context-based Hierarchical Logging

Inspired by the fine-grained logging control present in Wine, I set about building a similar stand-alone system for my own projects. The end result, however, proved suited to much larger projects than I typically write. spt::Context (more properly spt_context, since it's written in C) implements support for hierarchies of contexts into which messages are logged, and an inheritance-based approach to controlling them.

spt::Context currently has some bugs related to the manipulation of logging hierarchies' structure post-creation, and dynamic reparenting of contexts shouldn't be used. Additionally mlog, the underlying function used for logging, really needs some TLC.

See include/support/spt-context.h for the details.

'k thx bai

There are other interesting things here, in varying states of bit-rot and and amounts of documentation. Maybe I'll write about them eventually. Maybe I won't. But whatever I do, don't you hold your breath on account of it.