With today we (might) start a series of posts where we will be exploring the potential of C++, together with Cinder and other libraries for our creative coding/digital fabrication purposes. The idea is to use the power of C++ for creating more complex and spectacular outputs which would not be possible to obtain with Processing.
Before proceeding, a little background about myself. By formation I am an architect (urban planner to be precise) that, through the courses of life, ended up doing code (although, for respect towards the real professionals, I still hesitate a lot to call myself a programmer). I am currently working in the Voxelizer team of the Polish 3D printing manufacturer ZMorph, mostly trying to come up with new algorithms for the software. In the beginning I was using Processing (being the only tool I knew), during the last six months or so I’ve being engaged more and more with C++, the same language that my colleagues use. Now I start to feel quite comfortable in navigating the code base and in implementing my own stuff within the structure that my colleagues built but the amount of material that I need to learn is still huge. And since the best way to learn a language is to write in that language, I thought that now it is about time for me to start using C++ for my personal projects. I think that I will find out soon if this was a good idea or not. C++ might be an overkill/over-complicated for the purposes of this blog but still I think it can be worth giving a shot, it might reserve some nice surprises.
All of this to say that the following posts will be more a documentation of what I will be learning rather than “lectures” and because of that I apologize in advance for all the mistakes that I will write. I will also try to keep writing Processing posts, since I think that these ones are more interesting for the “target” of the blog. A good exercise would be rewriting Processing programs in C++ and see if I can give them a performance boost..
We’ll see, enough talking now.
