Bachelor Thesis - Computer Graphics Group

Chapter 3
Technologies used
The application has been developed in C++, as already mentioned in the Introduction.
The main reasons for choosing C++ were high performance and the
ability to write low-level system code easily. After selecting the programming
language, the development tools and libraries had to be decided. C++ is an
extremely widespread language offering dozens of development environments
and thousands of different libraries and toolkits.
3.1 Visual Studio 2008 + Feature Pack
The choice of the integrated development environment (IDE) was straightforward.
Microsoft Visual Studio is a quality product, probably the best choice
for Windows development. A student license for non-commercial purposes is
available through the MSDN Academic Alliance program. The C++ compiler
offers very good performance of the generated binary code. MSDN provides
extensive documentation of the Windows API, which cannot be avoided. The
program has to interact with and control other user’s applications in ways not
offered by higher-level frameworks.
Smart pointers, included in Technical Report 1 (TR1) [35], have been used.
TR1 is an addition to the Standard Template Library (STL). By using the
shared ptr template class, the majority of explicit object destruction could be
eliminated. This helps to avoid potential memory leaks and problems related
to passing of object instances. There are two ways how to get TR1. Either
from the Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack [24], which has been released recently
and will be a part of the upcoming Service Pack 1. The second possibility is to
use Boost, a collection of free high quality C++ libraries for various purposes.
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