Emil's January Update

By Emil Dotchevski on

Feb 20, 2021

History

This is my first entry on the C++ Alliance web site. I am happy to have been invited to join the organization.

I first talked to Vinnie on Slack, and was surprised to find that he is practically a neighbor. So we got in touch, had breakfast together, talked about C++ and life, the universe and everything. We became friends, he took care of our cats when we flew to Europe (pre-Covid), and I brought back some Rakia (next time I’ll bring him some of my father’s home-made stuff!)

(Boost) URL

My immediate focus after joining the C++ Alliance is to work on what will hopefully become Boost.URL. C++ has long been missing a solid standard-conforming library for working with URLs, we often get contacted by impatient users asking about the state of things.

Building on the foundation already in place and requiring only C++11, the library is being developed to the highest standards of portability, safety and efficiency. We’re also careful to keep the design simple, with a lot of attention paid to minimizing physical coupling so that compilation is as fast as possible.

About

I started coding in middle school on the Bulgarian-made Apple ][ clone Правец-82 (named after – you guessed it – the birth place of the leader of the Bulgarian Communist Party at the time). This has resulted in a lot of useless information being engraved on my brain, I still remember some of the opcodes of the 6502 CPU. :)

After graduating the Sofia University I moved to L.A. to work in the video game industry where I’ve spent most of my professional career, starting with the original Playstation all the way to modern consoles and handhelds. For the last few years I’ve shifted to projects that utilize my background in realtime graphics engines in areas that are not directly connected to gaming.

Pretty much all of my projects have been written in C++. This includes several Boost libraries, the latest one being LEAF, a Lightweight Error Augmentation Framework for C++11. I’ll probably post about error handling at some later time, as this is one of my key areas of interest.

Thanks for reading.

Emil Dotchevski