Hello Renaud #001

At RodeoFX my friend Renaud and me informally discussed our findings, tips, tricks and sometimes frustration. As we are currently no longer working together anymore, this serie of articles aim to keep sharing what I recently learned, with no specific order or priorities.

• GitHub and GitLab both support a CODEOWNERS file that indicates who in repos in responsible of maintaining some code. This is useful for automation, for example to add reviewers to a pull request: less platform configuration, more in-repo semantics.
• Everything is a really fast search tool for Windows with valuable features: speed indeed, but also an handy CLI and HTTP API and comprehensive configuration options.
• Catch2 is single header C++ test framework, making it really fast to setup. I'm just starting to discover it and already like its simplicity very much.
• I forgot about this one, but USD has a nifty API for debugging logs: TF_DEBUG=PLUG_* can be set in the environment variables to output logs specific for plugins.
• The Windows SDK defines min and max as macros, clashing with the ones with the C++ STL. However if NOMINMAX is defined before including Window.h those macros won't be present, fixing the collision.
• Visual Studio needs to be told what kind a library needs to be linked at runtime. Coding for USD, for example, requires to link with the Multi-Threaded Debug DLL or the app will crash at startup.
• Windows as much different rules to find runtime libraries that would be expected on Unices. Practically, the equivalent of LD_LIBRARY_PATH is PATH, which also holds the executables search paths list.
• In Windows (or for what I understand, for code compiled with Visual Studio), a binary can link against static .LIB or shared .DLL. However, applications needs to explicitely open the .dll. To ease the process a bit a .lib can only contain what is needed to find and link a .dll at runtime. Practically that means that when linking against a .lib it is not immediately sure if it contains static code or pointing against a .dll, in which case it is called an import library. This can be however be found by querying the linker.
• bqt allows to run Qt code in Blender. The project is still in early stages and there seem to be some issues (two UI libraries competing for the same events: expect clashes), but still, it's a start: I've been able to open a Qt dialog then run some blender code.