Moving to Dart from C++

A couple of days ago, while recovering from some flu, I managed to catch up a bit of me reading. If you know anything about the life of an independent contractor, you’d know that there’s never time for your personal projects or hobbies, so this was a most welcome break.

One of my favorite blogs is this one and I saw a great article on Sorting vectors in C++ by Nic Raboy. As it happens, C++ is one of my first commercial languages and I still make some moderate use of it for various mobile projects.

One thing that struck me, as I read the code, was how close this was to the Dart programming language. I’ve been doing a lot of Flutter development of late, and have been making more use of the Dart programming language. Mobile applications often contain complex logic, and this is where Dart has really proven it’s worth to me, in both being a concise and expressive language, but also being familiar enough that I didn’t have to learn everything from scratch to be productive.

In this short tutorial, we’ll take the quicksort algorithm Nic has built in C++ and convert it to Dart. Along the way, we’ll see how close Dart is to C++ and how much of your existing C++ knowledge easily transfers to the Dart environment.

Sort A Vector Of Integers With The Quicksort Algorithm In C++

If you’re studying computer science, at some point you’re going to be exposed to the Quicksort algorithm. Even if you’re not a computer science student, chances are this particular algorithm will come up at some point in time as part of an interview. I’ve been asked about it plenty of times in interview processes and never once used it again.

Whether or not you’ll ever use the Quicksort algorithm, it is important to know and that is what we’re going to review in this back to the basics tutorial.

In this tutorial we’re going to sort a vector of integer values using the Quicksort algorithm. We’re going to use a vector because it is a commonly used data structure in C++.

Getting Familiar With Arrays And Vectors In C++

When it comes to the fundamentals of computer programming, arrays will almost always make an appearance. Being able to store a collection of values could be beneficial to a near endless amount of use-cases.

To continue the back to the basics programming series, in this tutorial we’ll explore standard arrays as well vectors which are a much more powerful alternative when it comes to C++.

Getting Familiar With Loops In C++

In this back to the basics tutorial, we’re going to be exploring loops in C++, something that you’ll take with you well into your software development career, regardless of programming language. The content in this tutorial is targeted at new developers or those that would like to start learning C++.

So when might you want to use a loop? If you need to perform a repetitive task of any kind, a loop is probably going to be want you want to use.

In this tutorial we’re going to explore for loops, while loops, and do-while loops using the C++ programming language.

Configure Visual Studio Code For C++ Development

I mentioned a few months ago that I was going to periodically go back to the basics when it comes to computer programming and application development. Building a Hello World Example C++ Application was a first example of what I was talking about. However, in this previous example, much of our work was done in a basic text editor, then compiled and ran with a Command Prompt or Terminal. It works, but it isn’t the most elegant.

In this tutorial we’re going to see how to configure a more modern IDE for C++ development. Visual Studio Code (VSC) actually has really nice support for C++, so we’re going to see how to configure it.

Building A Hello World Example C++ Application

I decided to take some time every month to go back to the basics when it comes to development. As you might know, I earned a Computer Science degree from the University of California, Merced, and most of the courses I took involved C++ development. While some of the more modern code schools teach JavaScript, the common university will continue to teach C++ for the foreseeable future.

Getting started with something like C++ can seem like a daunting task, especially since C++ is such a powerful development language. We’re going to see how to write, compile, and run a simple C++ application to help you get started with one of the more seasoned development options.