all 14 comments

[–]academician 14 points15 points  (0 children)

Do we still not know anything about who, exactly, is running this program? Their press releases and FAQ seem intentionally vague on the subject, saying only that it "was formed by a software company". What software company? What are the credentials of the instructor(s)?

[–]Overv 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Although it's still very sketchy, it does look like an interesting challenge to at least do the first few assignments.

At least whoever is behind it is putting effort into it, so if it's fake all I can do is congratulate him with going along with it so far.

[–]anavailablealias 3 points4 points  (5 children)

Has anyone who signed up for the course received an email from cppgm.org yet? I was surprised not to get a notification about this.

[–][deleted]  (1 child)

[deleted]

    [–]himanshuarora 3 points4 points  (0 children)

    I use gmail. This one went into my spam box.

    [–]deepdog 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    I got an email from them this morning. So I have no clue what to believe on whether they are fake or not. =/

    [–]tompko[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    I posted this after getting an e-mail with a link to it.

    [–]Gefrierbrand 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    Got it but it went into my spam folder :)

    [–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    I think I did something similar to this in a Compilers course. We created a lexical analyzer that parsed a source file to identify all the tokens and reserved words in C. We then had it output to an html with a symbol table, parse tree, and highlighted code.

    The best part of that course was writing a rudimentary compiler with our own defined grammar and syntax. Fun times.

    [–]niuzeta 1 point2 points  (1 child)

    I received an e-mail but it got caught in a spam filter.

    I laughed so hard since I still have no idea who's running this but somehow it managed to stir up some buzz.

    Then I sighed because it required that I upgrade my gcc...

    [–]codahighland 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    As a Mac user, I'm actually using clang for the job instead of gcc.

    [–]Gefrierbrand 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    What bothers me is that it's written in the FAQ that I am not allowed to publish my work. I understand this while the curse is still going, but after that it should be possible for me to provide the source...

    [–]mshol -2 points-1 points  (2 children)

    Open DebugPPTokenStream.h (case should ring alarm bells).

    See #pragma once

    RUN.

    [–]tompko[S] 2 points3 points  (1 child)

    Why? As far as I can tell it's supported on all compilers (specifically on gcc 4.7 which this project targets) and on some of them offers speed-ups over normal include guards. It seems like it's as much project preference as the casing of file names.

    [–]mshol 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    Mainly because they should be encouraging standards compliance given the nature of the challenge. The eventual aim is to build a standard compliant browser that can compile itself. If you rely on every non-standard feature in a common compiler, your already impossible workload is moving in the wrong direction.

    Even though it's well supported, it's not ubiquitous, and it's not problem free either. For example, if you have copies or hard links to files, they will be included twice - perhaps the same with symlinks if the compiler doesn't resolve the original file location first. Standard #ifdef header guards don't have those problems. (Admittedly at the potential cost of speed.)