MarathonKit

MarathonKit is a library that simplifies writing programs during competitions like Challenge24, Marathon24 or Deadline24. MarathonKit aims to speed up certain tasks that commonly occur during those competitions. All of those competitions let contestants use code that was written before the competition and often require them to communicate with a remote server over a network. Inside the library you can find code that simplifies network communication and other functionality that might be useful.

Installation

If you are using the source archive, unpack its contents and in the unpacked directory run ./configure and make. If everything goes smoothly, this will create a libMarathonKitCore.a file which you can link with your other sources. To use the library in your program, set the include path to $MARATHON_KIT_DIR/include (where $MARATHON_KIT_DIR is the path to the unpacked directory) and then include its header files using for example #include <MarathonKit/Core.h>.

If you have cloned the MarathonKit repository, you will need automake, autoconf and the autoconf-archive to create the configuration files. You can do so by running autoreconf --install in the root of the repository. After that you can follow the steps from the previous paragraph (run ./configure and make).

If you want to modify MarathonKit and you have GCC or a compatible compiler, it is recommended to run ./dev-configure instead of ./configure. It will enable some extra warnings when you build the library.

Features

Network communication

You can use the MarathonKit::Core::Network class to create TCP and UDP connections easily. To create a TCP client, create an instance of the class TcpClient. It takes the host name and service port of the remote server as parameters of its constructor. For example the following code will connect to a local server on port 1234, send a single line and then prints the first line it receives back:

TcpClient tcp("localhost", "1234");
tcp.sendLine("Hello world!");
std::cout << tcp.getLine() << std::endl;

To create an UDP listener, use the function Network::createUdpListener. It takes the service port on which you want to listen as its parameter and returns an instance of a class FileDescriptor that you can use to read the incoming messages. Here is an example of a code that will listen on port 1234 and print all incoming messages:

FileDescriptor udp = Network::createUdpListener("1234");
while (true) {
  std::cout << udp.read() << std::endl;
}

Logging and debugging

If you include the MarathonKit/LogMacro.h header file, you can use the macros LOGD, LOGI, LOGW and LOGE to log debugging information, information, warnings and errors to standard error. All of those macros take an arbitrary number of parameters an convert them to strings using the C++ stream operators. For example:

std::string fileName = "a.txt";
size_t fileSize = 1234;
LOGD("File ", fileName, " is ", fileSize, " bytes long.");

This will print out File a.txt is 1234 bytes long.

You can also call the static function MarathonKit::Core::Log::setLogFile(fileName) to send the log into a file as well or MarathonKit::Core::Log::setMinLogLevel(level) to set the minimum logging level.

In addition to those, you can use the macro DEBUG defined in MarathonKit/DebugMacro.h to quickly print out the contents of variables:

int x = 42;
std::string s = "foo";
DEBUG(x, s);

This code will print out (x, s) = (42, foo).

License

This file is part of MarathonKit. Copyright (C) 2015 Jakub Zika

MarathonKit is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA.

I am providing code in this repository to you under an open source license. Because this is my personal repository, the license you receive to my code is from me and not from my employer (Facebook).