Programming-Languages

This post was originally written on Codeforces; relevant discussion can be found here. As of May 2024, the bug has been fixed in GCC 14, but has not been ported to Codeforces yet. MikeMirzayanov added a new compiler in response to the bug mentioned here. However, it does not come without a catch. Namely, any pragma that is of the form #pragma GCC target(...) would NOT work with this new compiler. The issue is well-known by people who use up-to-date compilers but there has not been much progress towards a fix. ...

This post was originally written on Codeforces; some relevant discussion can be found here. Note: for those who don’t like using the post-increment operator (i++), hopefully this post convinces you that it is not just a convention that C programmers coaxed the world into following out of tradition. Also, all of the following discusses the increment operators in C++, and not C, where the semantics are slightly different. Disclaimer: I use ++i much more often in code. But i++ has its own place, and I use it — and the generalization I mention — quite frequently wherever it is a sane choice. ...

This post was originally written as a feature request for Codeforces; some relevant discussion can be found here. I believe that adding the Boost library on Codeforces would be a great addition for C++ competitive programmers. AtCoder already supports it (alongside GMP and Eigen, but Boost has replacements/wrappers for those: Boost.Multiprecision and Boost.uBLAS). CodeChef supports it too (or at least used to support it at some point, not sure now). I’ve seen at least 3 posts by people trying to use Boost on Codeforces and failing, and on thinking about it, I couldn’t really come up with a good reason (in my opinion) that Boost should not be supported on Codeforces. ...

This post was originally written on Codeforces; relevant discussion can be found here. People often say C++ is much more cumbersome to write than any sane language should be, but I think that is mainly due to lack of knowledge about how to write modern C++ code. Here’s how you can write code more smartly and succinctly in C++(20): Negative indexing with end Have you ever found yourself using a vector like a stack just because you have to also access the last few positions, or writing a sliding window code using a deque (where the size might be variable, but you want to access an element at some offset from the end)? ...

This post was originally written on Codeforces; relevant discussion can be found here. This post was initially meant to request updates to the C compiler on Codeforces (given the large number of posts complaining about “mysterious” issues in their submissions in C). While writing it, I realized that the chances of the said updates would be higher if I mentioned a few reasons why people would like to code in C instead of C++ (some of the reasons are not completely serious, as should be evident from the context). ...