A drawback that people often mention when programming in C is the lack of RAII. This is sometimes good as it causes me to avoid small, random allocations and incentivize grouping data into large, contiguous memory regions to make them faster and more manageable. However, small, random allocations are sometimes unavoidable, and there should still be a way to manage them. Instead of grouping data into arrays, we can instead group data by their lifetime, and this is where the “arena” allocator comes in.

I recently programmed a large chunk of the game from scratch for a university course project. This is one of a few projects that I delivered with enough quality and presentability. So I wanted to document my process of making it, what I learned, and how I applied my knowledge from and outside the course.

From breadth-first search to task scheduling, queues are extremely useful in computer programming. Although many programming languages support them, I think that it’s important to understand and know how to implement them. I like to implement data structures on-the-fly and customize them for the problem I’m trying to solve. A more practical reason to understand queues is that JavaScript doesn’t have an efficient queue implementation.

When I first heard about run-time polymorphism in C++ using virtual methods, my first thoughts were like, “This is cool and all, but why would I ever use this?” Then I continued to ignore it because I could always just work around it instead of using it. Until recently, my college lecturer told me that using virtual methods is great for designing and maintaining applications with thousands of objects. I figured that I should write about what run-time polymorphism is, and why I still think that I don’t need it.

I already have a website hosted on GitHub pages. It was built around 2 years ago as a way to quickly browse and access my web projects. Basically, it was just a grid of project thumbnails, which is pretty boring. During the last 2 years, I changed bits and pieces of it, but it’s still the same boring layout with only a list of projects and some basic information.