Tales of a developer

Learning new things is important for every developer. I've mentioned  this before, and in the spirit of doing just that, I've started a somewhat ambitious project. I want to do a large-scale simulation, using  Elixir  and Go , coupled with a physics simulation in C++. I've never done anything in Elixir before, and only played a little bit with Go, but I figure,  how hard can it be ? Exsim I've dubbed this project exsim - it's a simulation done in Elixir. Someday I'll think about a more catchy name - for now I'm just focusing on the technical bits. Here's an overview of the system as I see it today: exsim  sits at the heart of it - this is the main server, implemented in Elixir. exsim-physics  is the physics simulation. It is implemented in C++, using the Bullet physics library. exsim-physics-viewer  is a simple viewer for the state of the physics simulation, written in Go. exsim-bot  is a bot for testing exsim, written i...

Earlier this year I started experimenting with the  Xmpp   protocol , and implemented bots in Python to communicate with an Xmpp server. I've now revisited those bots and reimplemented them in  Go . I've been meaning to learn Go for quite a while, and this seemed like a reasonable first project to tackle. The source code lives on GitHub:  https://github.com/snorristurluson/xmpp-chatbot If you are an experienced Go developer, I would appreciate any feedback and suggestions on how to improve the code - if you are just starting out with Go like myself, I hope this blog and the code is useful to you. As  before , I'm using  Prosody  to communicate with. Just like I did in Python, my first experiment is to simply open up a socket and poke the server to see where that takes us: func main () { conn , err := net. Dial ( " tcp " , " localhost:5222 " ) if err != nil { fmt. Errorf ( " Couldn't connect " ) } messa...