Tuesday, April 7, 2026

Reusing code in const and non-const methods, C++17

I found the code below from this great answer in StackOverflow. It allows you to implement the const method with your logic, then use this one-liner to implement the non-const method. It’s a trick from the great Scott Meyers:

const T& f() const {
	return something_complicated();
}

T& f() {
	return const_cast<T&>(std::as_const(*this).f());
}

I’m using this thing everywhere.

Thursday, April 2, 2026

Project templates in Visual Studio 2022

After configuring C and C++ projects countless times, base on these settings, I finally bit the bullet and created a reusable template in Visual Studio 2022. And it’s surprisingly simple: create the project and then go Project → Export Template.

The project name itself can be used inside files with $safeprojectname$ string. In order to have it replaced even inside .rc files, edit the .vstemplate and add:

<TemplateContent>
  <Project TargetFileName="ayylmao.vcxproj" File="ayylmao.vcxproj" ReplaceParameters="true">
    <ProjectItem ReplaceParameters="true">RES\$safeprojectname$.rc</ProjectItem>
  </Project>
</TemplateContent>

There’s no GUI for deleting a template, though. One must manually remove the zip files from two different locations:

  • Documents \ My Exported Templates
  • Documents \ Templates \ Project Templates

To restore a template, simply copy the zip back to:

  • Documents \ Templates \ Project Templates

Sunday, February 15, 2026

The Rust doc_cfg fiasco

In WinSafe, Cargo features are used extensively to gate the DLL modules which are currently implemented. This is good because you specify only the modules you need, reducing your compiler effort. The Rust documentation doc_auto_cfg unstable feature was extemely useful, applying tags on each entity specifying the required feature for it.

Then, at some point of October 2025, doc_auto_cfg was merged into doc_cfg. And it’s now completely broken.

I filled an issue at the official repo. I’m not the only one missing that feature, but no one seems to care. This is so demotivating I stopped WinSafe development completely.

I found a workaround by pinning the compiler version using rust-toolchain.toml, along with the last version where doc_auto_cfg works, which I painfully found out:

[toolchain]
channel = "nightly-2025-09-27"
components = ["rust-docs"]
targets = ["x86_64-pc-windows-msvc"]

With the above file, the command line to generate the docs is:

RUSTDOCFLAGS="--cfg docsrs" cargo doc --all-features

Or even better, directly specify the toolchain the command line:

RUSTDOCFLAGS="--cfg docsrs" cargo +nightly-2025-09-27 doc --all-features

This compiler has the 1.92.0-nightly version, and it seems I’m gonna using for a long time.

Update: after 4 months, the bug was finally fixed.