Re: How to start a C++ software project?

On Feb 22, 9:13 am, "shuisheng" <shuishen...@yahoo.com> wrote:


Just this: C++ is a poor choice of language for situations where you
don't initially know what you are implementing or how to implement it,
but acquire that knowledge in an exploratory way.

Firstly, you are constrained by edit-compile-link-run cycles. The
entire program has to be well-formed; everything has to dove-tail
before you can execute any of it. This property also makes programs
resistant to many of the kinds of changes you might want to experiment
with in an iterative development situation, by assigning a large cost
to those experiments: the conceptually small change requires too large
of a ripple of collateral changes so that the program continues to
compile, build and run. Insulating modules to minimize their
dependencies requires a bit of know how, and also the development of
various shims which clutter the program because they exist only for
the sake of that insulation.

The only part of your idea that benefits from C++ is the actual
simulation of the propagation of sound waves in the given given
geometry. This could be encapsulated as a library with some well-
defined binary interface: data types for communicating the model to
the library, functions for setting up the simulation paramters and
doing the simulation, and ways of obtaining the results in some given
representation, possibly with real-time feedback.

The rest of the surrounding software could be done up in some dynamic
language that has a decent GUI toolkit and a foreign-function calling
capability.

Another thing to consider is how much existing software could you
reuse. There is already software out there which can create three-
dimensional models and export them in some known format that other
programs can parse. That could be good enough for creating the
geometry for these sound wave simulations. I understand that the
objects in the model have to be attributed with additional properties
related to acoustics, but maybe some modelling programs have a way to
represent that with some user-defined generic attributes that can be
attached to the model elements.