mctalian/cpp-dice

A Loaded Dice program written in C++

cpp-dice

This is a program that simulates a number of tosses for a number of loaded dice. Each throw is printed to the console and, at the end of all the throws, the statistics for each die is printed to the console.

Getting Started

Docker

For your convenience, the environment is Docker-ized. Simply install the Docker Toolbox and then navigate to this repository's folder using the Docker shell. Execute ./docker-build first to build the image for the first time. Once that has completed, run ./docker-run. You should then see a shell prompt. Navigate to /src and you're ready to execute Make commands. After you've executed ./docker-run, you should be able to execute ./docker-start for subsequent runs.

You will also be able to run unit tests right out of the box with this as it downloads and extracts googletest automatically when building the image. The ./docker-run command also ties the /src directory to the container's /src directory using a volume, so any changes made on your host PC will be included on the guest container as well.

Non-Docker

If you don't want to use Docker, you need to install make, gcc, gcc-c++, and googletest for unit tests (if you want to run them). If you want to run unit tests, you may need to edit the Makefile to point to the location of your googletest directory. If you do not do this, building the tests will fail.

General

Once you're navigated to the directory on a system with make, gcc, you can execute Make commands. To run the program, execute make main. This will build all the needed object files and then create a main executable in the output directory. Execute output/main example.conf from the /src directory and the program should run. Follow the format in example.conf and you can make your own simulation scenarios.

Learning Outcomes

This was a partial refresher for C++ as I've been working in Web-Dev for a while. I also tried to focus on Test Driven Development and used Googletest for the first time. It was a positive experience and seemed to take away a lot of the painful debugging sessions. This was the first time I used Docker to setup my development environment. There are still a lot of advanced features that I could probably leverage, but overall it was fun and surprisingly easy to use Docker. Much less painful than VMs.