“Sometimes, only too much of something is enough, a fact
that programmers specifically, and computerphiles in general, seem
to appreciate at a deeper level than most people. What better
way to put that observation and philosophy to good use (at least
within the realm of computing) than by creating the most
extravagant “Hello, world” Linux programming example possible?”
“That’s exactly what I’ll be doing in this column over many
installments. I’ll take a very simple GUI program and add support
for as many Linux APIs, GUI tricks, and general programming
techniques as I can manage to hammer into one program. Along the
way we’ll look at the pros and cons of different approaches and
design philosophies, and generally build our little Hello Universe
program into a treasure trove of reusable code samples, one step at
a time….”
“The main intent of the Hello Universe project is to help
programmers get up to speed with GUI Linux programming, in a
realistic context. That’s where we’ll deviate from most of the
published sample code we’ve all seen over the years that cuts
corners by not checking for failed function calls and other nasty
details we’d all like to ignore. Such practices cause countless
pain for us and the users of our work, since they lead directly to
the debacle of buffer overflows and mismanaged C strings.”