April Update - Part 2: Toot With C
Andrew Chronister

[Continued from part 1]

If you've read my release post, you may remember that TWC heavily relies on code generation to allow for rapid updates in response to Twitter API changes. To refresh your memory, here's the basic idea:

[ol]

  • A script runs over the Twitter API documentation website to gather a schema of all of the Twitter API endpoints. This schema includes information about the URI, name, description, and inferred type of each endpoint.
  • A set of templates ("pattern", not C++ template) is defined in addition to the rest of the library framework code. These templates specify how a given type is serialized out to a string or cURL parameter.
    • [li]A [ur

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    April Update - Part 1: A Mammoth Task
    Andrew Chronister

    Past Me

    Looking ahead, I plan to spend a solid chunk of time next month giving some TLC to some of my older projects, including TWC and 4vim. More on that as events transpire!

    A wise man
    The best-laid plans of mice and men / Go oft awry

    So imagine you're me. You've started out a new quarter at University with an unprecedentedly light schedule -- three classes, all on Tuesdays and Thursdays. You've got all the time in the world on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, not to mention the weekends. You've several projects you're itching to put in time and code on. Things look to be going pretty well, and you make a few commits on some dusty git repos.

    March is nearing a close and the world is, if not normal or ordinary, business as usual, as much as it can be in the current political climate. Twitter's a bit of a stressful affair these days, but you still hop on occasionally to catch up on current events, thoughts from other programmers, and so on.

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    March Update
    Andrew Chronister

    Greetings everyone,

    I unfortunately have no progress to report for March. I finished winter quarter with good grades thanks to spending most of my time the first few weeks of March doing homework or studying, but that left me with little time to work on additional projects like TWC. Over spring break, I spent my development time on prototyping an idea I've had ruminating for a while.

    Looking ahead, I plan to spend a solid chunk of time next month giving some TLC to some of my older projects, including TWC and 4vim. More on that as events transpire!

    -- Andrew

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    February Update
    Andrew Chronister

    Greetings everyone,

    With Handmade Network v1.0 out, I've been taking a break from my software projects to focus on schoolwork. This quarter, I'm taking an Operating Systems class and a Compilers class, both of which are heavily project-based and require a great deal of my off-time.

    However, TWC may benefit directly from these. In the OS class, I've been writing a lot of C, meant to be read by my project partner and the graders, which has been improving my code style and documentation quality. In the Compilers class, I've been learning about the inner workings of compilers, which will allow me to write more conformant code.

    Next time I have a chunk of time to work on TWC, I will be working on the following:

    [ul]

  • Cleaning up the twitter.h header to make it more suitable for use by language bindings. E.g. removing $ from identifiers, relying less on macro-based generics, narrowing down to a smaller list of types.
    • [li]Improving the metaprogramming layer for future c

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    Tweet With C is out now!
    Andrew Chronister

    Last summer, when I was down in Florida for a NASA internship, I was challenged by my housemates to a summer code-off. The goal? To build the coolest piece of software in a mere 10 weeks. Having recently begun exploring the world of Twitter bots, and disappointed that there was no existing library to make Twitter API queries from C, I resolved to spend my summer building a library to do just that.

    And now, 6-and-a-bit months later, in the dead of winter, I finally finished. Behold, Tweet With C!

    Download

    This might seem kind of nuts -- who would want to use twitter from such a low level language? Well, it's not as nuts as you might think. I envisioned two major use cases when I began this project:

    1. Code that wraps this library in a higher level language (many languages have compatibility layers for working with native/C functions).

    2. Projects that want to interact with twitter without using one of the potentially-heavier li

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