DCTL Tutorial

These are the supporting agenda and completed DCTL files for my DCTL Tutorial Series.

DCTL Coding Best Practices:

Below is a short list of best practices when coding your DCTLs to make sure they operate correctly on all platforms. If there is something omitted from this list, feel free to create an Issue or a Pull Request and let me know!

1. Don't use { ... } to initialize variables EXCEPT on a line where the variable is declared
2. Don't pass { ... } into a function. Make maker functions for structs similar to make_float3.
3. Don't pass static strings into a function that expects a char[]. Assign that string to a char[] variable first.
4. Don't use the word transform anywhere except in the transform function name
5. Don't use the word return anywhere except in return statements
6. Declare pointers like __PRIVATE__ int *foo or they won't work on Mac
7. _powf() has different behaviors for negative base on Mac and windows, so make sure you wrap it in your own function to be explicit about what you want it to do for negative base
8. Make sure functions are always defined (or prototyped) before they are called
9. Don't break the DEFINE_UI_PARAMS statements into multiple lines
10. Don't break the transform( ... ) function signature into multiple lines
11. Don't put parentheses in the names of your DEFINE_UI_PARAMS parameters
12. For the sake of my DCTL interpreter, don't pass integers into the built-in functions/macros that expect floats. Use _log2f(3.0) instead of _log2f(3). The fusion devs forgot to typecast them
13. Preferably, avoid the use of __CONSTANT__, it's hard to get the type checking to allow passing these into functions