c++

I was recently working on a project which involved performing a number of tasks asynchronously, with the constraint that the tasks could be performed in any order, but they must “commit” in a specific order based on a dependency chain.

When talking about data structures, I often like to say that there are two basic ones: arrays and linked lists. These two structures accomplish the same task: storing a sequence of items. But one of them is significantly better in most situations.

A bit array is a simple data structure that allows you to compactly represent an array of booleans, but constructing one requires some low-level binary manipulations that you may not be familiar with. Let’s walk through the basic principles, and mock up a simple example of a bit array.

The semester is wrapping up, and so like many students, I’m rushing to finish projects that I could have started weeks ago, but elected not to. And, along the way, I made an important discovery about how important std::endl is if you’re using std::cout in C++.