These are some considerations that were made during the restructuring of BHJet into Kariba. It can also be seen as a form of a F.A.Q.

Build system

The make build system is used. This is one of the simpler, and readily available, build systems around (though it can get complex if wanted). Given that the likely systems where Kariba should be build and run on are Linux and macOS (from the terminal), no need for another build system seems necessary.

Configuration is done with a small file where a few variables can be set; there is no extensive configure (from autotools) script.

CMake

By now, using CMake is far more standard for C++ projects. But CMake can feel very verbose, with dozens of functions to set variables. It is, in fact, a configuration language to create makefiles or equivalent for a variety of OSes and build systems, which is not necessary in this case: its output for Kariba would be a (more complex) Makefile on the Linux and macOS shell.

Meson and Ninja are other alternatives for a build system, but the availability and (in this case) the simplicity of using make directly doesn't warrant the use of Meson or friends.

Namespacing

Namespacing is liberally used, including prefixes to all common math functions and iostream functions. This makes things a bit verbose, but should also be clearer on what functions are actually used (even if common).

A few exceptions still exist (including ones that slipped through the replace-net), such as size_t instead of std::size_t.

Constants

Constants have their own subnamespace. They are not capitalized, as is standard for constants, since this is less mathematical, and also prevents one from distinguishing prefixes such as m versus M (although MILLI and MEGA could probably work fine here).

Use of <tt>size_t</tt> and variable types

Many int occurrences have been replaced with size_t. This is not out of necessity: array sizes are generally small enough that an int will suffice. It is more indicative: the use of size_t indicates this variable is used to limit the size of an array (although vectors carry their own size in the form of a .size() method; which returns a size_T) or is used to index an array (such as index variables in a loop).

Replacement of other variable types

Some other occurences of either double or int could be made more explicit with fixed-width types, such as float64_t, in16_t, or int_least32_t. This, however, seems unnecessary, as the C++ standard guarantees enough precision and value-range for default doubles and integers. Note that float64_t is only available since C++23.

Use of <tt>auto</tt>

More use of auto is a possibility. This may make the code more flexible. auto is probably the most useful with complex types, such as std::vector<double>; but there are few places where the latter can indeed be replaced by auto.

Unit testing

Doctest is used for running unit tests. The initial set of unit tests were created using Claude LLM from the examples, and may have to be replaced by better implementations over time.

Doctest is certainly not the definitive unit testing framework to be used. Its advantage of being a single header file makes it easy to include it with the repository (though its size and presumed templating behind the scenes makes compilation relatively slow).

Other improvements and issues

Check the issue tracker on the GitHub repository for suggestions of improvements and features, and outstanding issues.