A couple of months ago, I applied for a job. I’d been working for the previous 6 years in Java, and the job was a C++ post so I needed to learn C++ quickly – as a good project to get me going, I wrote a raytracer. I got the job, and I’m about 5 months in – looking back at the code I’d written for this starter project, it’s not great – I’ve already learnt a lot in that time, so I’ve rewritten it – and this time I targeted only standard, portable C++ so it compiled nicely (at least the core of the raytracer does) under GCC 4 with no libraries on any platform I fancied.
Then I found out about NaCl – Native Client – Google’s system for building extensions for Chrome using native code – and noticed the requirements for building things in it are that it compiles in GCC 4. Sounded like a good test-case…
