Programmers are Lazy

Hey! That’s me! I’m lazy! If I can avoid (read: automate) doing something I will. So I did.

Making FlowPilot and releasing it means I needed to create documentation for it. Good thing there’s Doxygen, Sphinx, and other tools for that right?

Well, none of those solutions were what I wanted so I created my own.

My Doc-site Requirements

My doc website is hosted on Github and is a static website made with Astro.build.

• I need pages to be in Markdown
• I need pages to have a section I can manually edit in between the auto-generated content
• I need something that reads from a provided folder all C++ header files and parse it.
• I need it to be easy enough that I can include it in the build project process.

New Project means new opportunity to learn

I was reading and practising Zig for a while so I started with it to read and parse the files. Everything worked up to a point where I would get frustrated at the language (skill issue).

I was taking too long to make progress and getting used to the language.

I had to have something working faster than the learning rate my mind was willing to, to learn Zig, so I jumped ship and decided to learn Go instead.

Yes, I usually start more -way more- projects than I finish. It’s not Zig’s fault though, it’s clearly mine. To be fair, this probably isn’t the type of project to be choosing Zig for.

I’m sure I’ll find another project for Zig, but for this auto-doc one, I just wanted to progress faster and more importantly, not be frustrated about making little to no progress.

On the other side of the spectrum, working with Go -even as a first timer- is super friendly. I’m completely hooked! Converting the project took me a couple of hours.

After a few days, I had the parsing and formatting in a decent place that I could start to use it confidently. Working with go is super simple and it completely fulfilled my needs.

FlowPilot.Dev is live!

Each time I program FlowPilot, I can add comments -even markdown- and when I compile the code, I have a step in the pipeline to run a batch script to automatically read, update, and push the documentation pages to FlowPilot’s Github!

insert feels good meme

What’s next

Now that I’ve done that and its out of the way -mostly automated- I can focus on other stuff like tutorials, guides, videos etc. I’ve had a brief experience with Zig, then Go, and most importantly had fun.

You can check Go-Cpp-Mk on GitHub if you want and let me know where I’m doing things wrong.

This is it for now. Thanks for reading!