wxWidgets 2.8 to 3.0 Migration: Converting wxString to Numbers

wxWidgets provides a set of utility methods to converts wxString to various integer types such as ToLong(). While the documentation for those functions remained roughly the same between wxWidgets 2.8 and 3.0 the implementation did change. In wxWidgets 2.8, if the string was empty, using any of the number converstion functions would result in the value 0. But, in wxWidgets 3.0 it’s different as can be learned from the following comment in wxstring.cpp:

// notice that we return false without modifying the output parameter at all if
// nothing could be parsed but we do modify it and return false then if we did
// parse something successfully but not the entire string

This means that if you relied on ToLong() to store 0 to the pointer to long when given empty string, in wxWidgets 3.0 you will get uninitialized value there.

I also noticed when comparing the code of wxString in 2.8 and 3.0, that they implemented the integer conversion functions using C macros, while in 2.8 they used templates. I wonder why it was changed, as it looks more like a regression to me.

Simple Histogram Widget for wxWidgets

When working on Open Yahtzee 1.10 (or what ever I’ll call the version after 1.9), I’ve written a simple histogram widget to be part of the new statistics dialog. I should emphasize the simple part, this widget was mean to display a simple histogram without requiring any special bloated ploting libraries. It doesn’t support all the fancy stuff, just plain histogram.

I’ve figured that a simple pie plot would better serve Open Yahtzee’s needs, so unfortunately this code will not be released as part of the program. While the code is not perfect, it’s functional and serves a good example of a custom widget. So I’ve felt pity letting it fall into oblivion in Open Yahtzee’s SVN repository, and I’ve thought it might come handy to someone else (or at least for me) if it will be easily accessible.

simple_histogram
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Setting Up OmniComplete (Autocompletion) for wxWidgets in Vim

I use Vim as my main IDE for C/C++ related development (as well as for almost all other development). If you use (or thinking about using) vim as as an IDE, you better get some good autocompletion functionality. This kind of autocompletion is provided by the OmniComplete, which is available since Vim 7.0. Just having the OmniComplete is a nice thing, but it’s much more helpful if configured properly to work with the libraries you use, such as wxWidgets. In this post I will show you how to get working the OmniComplete for wxWidgets, however, the procedure I will show can be easily adapted to almost all libraries.
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