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CJ50 utility library

This is a helper library for teaching programming using C.

The emphasis here is on teaching programming, not teaching C: C is being used because it is a relatively simple language that also allows talking about memory and bits, has an important place in history, and is practical for making simple video games (which young starting programmer doesn't fancy doing that?) that can also run in the browser via WASM.

The aim of the library is hence to provide for an as nice introductionary programming experience as possible. It offers easy ways to get input from and write output to the terminal, and (not yet finished) 2D graphics output. It follows a Rust-inspired programming style: Option, unwrap, drop, using type names with an upper-case initial for complex types. It provides generic functions (via C11 _Generic) to avoid having to type out the fully named function specializations everywhere. The makefile compiles with sanitizers to catch undefined behaviour.

The name is derived from cs50.h which this library was originally inspired by.

Usage

This needs make, Clang and SDL2, as well as pandoc for generating the html files. In the current form it will probably only work on Linux or perhaps other Unix-like systems (commit 0594cb75a4 is known to work on MacOS). On Debian-derived systems, install the dependencies with:

sudo apt-get install make clang libsdl2-dev pandoc

For ease of use and updating, the Makefile can be used to build both the included examples and third party files but assumes that this library is checked out at ~/cdevelopment/cj50 (although alternatively you can set CJ50BASEDIR to the path of the checkout). Meaning, run the following to use this library:

cd
mkdir -p cdevelopment
cd cdevelopment
git clone https://github.com/pflanze/cj50
mkdir ownproject
cd ownproject
git init
ln -s ../cj50/Makefile
cp ../cj50/examples/basics.c .
make basics
./basics
# then write your own files and compile and use them:
$EDITOR myown.c
make myown
./myown

If you want to use make auto (which runs bin/auto-make), you need to install chj-scripts.

Documentation

The library files contain embedded documentation, which can be converted to Markdown and then html format via:

cd ~/cdevelopment/cj50
make doc

You can then open the file doc-output/index.html in your browser.

make doc simply uses the generated markdown files contained in the repository. If you edit the documentation in the library files, you need to run make gendoc instead to update the markdown files, but that also requires the FunctionalPerl Perl package to be installed.

Bugs and Todo

See BUGS.