basic.md

Coil Core basic libraries

Base coil_core_base

Provides basic primitives: book, buffer, streams.

Book

Book is an allocation helper, providing a way of management of long-living objects, alternative to RAII or smart pointers. The idea is that objects are to be allocated in a book, and then handled by simple reference (or pointer). When they are not needed anymore, book can be freed and then reused as necessary. Objects cannot be freed individually, as with smart pointers.

class Object { ... };
Book book;
Object& object = book.Allocate<Object>(objectArg1, objectArg2, ...);
...
book.Free(); // destructor also frees the book
// book is empty now

Unicode coil_core_unicode

Provides UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32 iterators and conversion.

Utilities coil_core_util

Basic utilities missing from standard library, mostly templates.

Entrypoint (coil_core_entrypoint, coil_core_entrypoint_console, coil_core_entrypoint_graphical)

Abstracts defining executable entry point on various platforms. Link coil_core_entrypoint_console or coil_core_entrypoint_graphical to the executable depending on whether it's console or graphical application.

#include <coil/entrypoint.hpp>

int COIL_ENTRY_POINT(std::vector<std::string>&& args)
{
  return 0;
}

Application identity coil_core_appidentity

Defines application identity globals, which are then used by various libraries (for example, to represent application in system's volume mixer).

#include <coil/appidentity.hpp>
...
auto& appIdentity = AppIdentity::GetInstance();
appIdentity.Name() = "My Application";
appIdentity.Version() = 12345678;

File system coil_core_fs

File system primitives: files, file streams, file memory mapping.

For simplicity represents file paths with std::string, always in UTF-8 encoding. Platform's native path separator is used.

Tasks coil_core_tasks

Asyncronous, parallel, coroutine-based tasks.