draft VS Box2D

I should have said the "latest standard", not "spec", if we're being technical. But EVERY bit of official material is very clear about asserting that C++23 is still a preview/in-progress, not a standard. Saying otherwise is, strictly speaking, incorrect.

https://isocpp.org/std/the-standard

https://www.iso.org/standard/79358.html

https://github.com/cplusplus/draft/blob/main/papers/n4951.md

[3] https://github.com/cplusplus/draft/releases/tag/n4917

*This is a joke, but only barely so.

pdf

I'm currently going through Annex A of C++20, but I can't find the definition of "designator brace-or-equal-initializer", and couldn't find much formal information on it in an obvious way. The newest source on [decl] (https://github.com/cplusplus/draft/blob/main/source/declarations.tex) also doesn't seem to have it. Am I missing anything, or is this a missing definition in the standard grammar?

> I don't have a copy of the standard at hand, can anyone quote the relevant section?

The C++ (draft) standard is on GitHub! [0] Compiling it needs Perl and some LaTeX packages, but is reasonably straightforwards otherwise. In addition, links to specific draft standards can be found on cppreference [1].

But anyways, in the first C++20 post-publication draft (N4868), the wording you're interested in is in multiple sections. Section 22.2.3 Sequence Containers [sequence.reqmts] has Table 78: Optional sequence container operations [tab:container.seq.opt] (starting on page 815), which states that a precondition of pop_back() is that empty() returns false. Section 16.3.2.4 Detailed Specifications [structure.specifications] (page 481) states:

> Preconditions: the conditions that the function assumes to hold whenever it is called; violation of any preconditions results in undefined behavior.

Therefore, calling pop_back() on an empty vector results in undefined behavior.

> Is this something that in practice is implemented in different (exception-throwing) ways?

Based on a quick glance at the major implementations (libc++ 15.0.7 at [2], MSVC at [3], libstdc++ at [4]), it looks like asserts are used. Whether those result in exceptions probably depends on whether the asserts are compiled in in the first place and how they are implemented, but it's definitely not a guaranteed exception.

[0]: https://github.com/cplusplus/draft

[1]: https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/links

[2]: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/llvmorg-15.0.7/lib...

[3]: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/8dfdcc7b7bf66834a7...

[4]: https://gcc.gnu.org/git/?p=gcc.git;a=blob;f=libstdc%2B%2B-v3...

Which standard specifically are you quoting there? I checked an old and a new C++ draft in https://github.com/cplusplus/draft/tree/main/papers, and in neither one did 6.3 have anything like that.

https://github.com/cplusplus/draft/releases/download/n4917/n4917.pdf (page 1, chapter 1 scope):

PRs for C++ are at https://github.com/cplusplus/draft But the discussion for a PR is via https://isocpp.org/std/submit-a-proposal

C/C++

By the way, https://github.com/cplusplus/draft/releases/tag/n4910 , says

For typical game physics engines... not that much. Math libraries like Eigen or Blaze use lots of template metaprogramming techniques under the hood that can help when you're doing large batched matrix multiplications (since it can remove temporary allocations at compile-time and can also fuse operations efficiently, as well as applying various SIMD optimizations), but it doesn't really help when you need lots of small operations (with mat3 / mat4 / vec3 / quat / etc.). Typical game physics engines tend to use iterative algorithms for their solvers (Gauss-Seidel, PBD, etc...) instead of batched "matrix"-oriented ones, so you'll get less benefits out of Eigen / Blaze compared to what you typically see in deep learning / scientific computing workloads.

The codebases I've seen in many game physics engines seem to all roll their own math libraries for these stuff, or even just use SIMD (SSE / AVX) intrinsics directly. Examples: PhysX (https://github.com/NVIDIA-Omniverse/PhysX), Box2D (https://github.com/erincatto/box2d), Bullet (https://github.com/bulletphysics/bullet3)...

Box2D: 2D engine used in Unity and also earlier versions of Godot. Open source.

Box2D GitHub repo: erincatto/box2d

Why is 600 lines too long? How are you able to make that judgment call without first knowing what the algorithm is even doing? People setting arbitrary limits like this is what leads to convoluted spaghetti, instead of just taking things on a case by case basis. Here’s a function from the Box2D code running a particularly complex algorithm for solving contact velocities https://github.com/erincatto/box2d/blob/411acc32eb6d4f2e96fc... .

It’s 310 lines long. It reads very well, and it looks very maintainable. It has very clear comments explaining the reasoning behind the harder parts of the code. Would you reject this code because it’s pretty long? I wouldn’t.

There is no such thing as too long or too short. There’s overengineered and there’s underengineered and there’s a sweet spot in the middle that has the perfect amount of engineering with the least amount of complexity (preferably no additional complexity than the original problem warranted). Sometimes, the problem at hand is inherently a large algorithm and requires many lines of code. Don’t split it up! It just makes it harder for future maintainers who now have to figure out if the additional functions are actually being used elsewhere or if they’re just there to make the code “pretty”.

There is always the approach of looking at how an existing engine is implemented, such as box2d: https://github.com/erincatto/box2d

TIL Box2D must not be serious code because it doesn't use copious amounts of explicit temporaries[0].

And just for the record, I'm very glad Erin Catto decided to use operator overloading in his code. It made it much easier for me to read and understand what the code was doing as opposed to it being overly verbose and noisy.

[0]: https://github.com/erincatto/box2d/blob/main/src/collision/b...

For Physics Box2d can be used as a simple starting point.

I suspect most C++ physics libraries like Box2D (https://github.com/erincatto/box2d) or Bullet3 (https://github.com/bulletphysics/bullet3) could really benefit a lot from SIMD.

for 2D physics have a look at Box2D it's amazing https://box2d.org/