C++23 Refresh and budgetwarrior 1.1.0

Baptiste Wicht — Sun, 10 Sep 2023 04:50:28 GMT

I am happy to announce the release of budgetwarrior 1.1.0.

The last release of budgetwarrior was more than 5 years ago. So, once I finished my C++20/C++23 refresh of the code, I decided it was a good time to generate a new release. There has been many improvements in this new version:

Many new graphs on the web interface
Add support for tracking stock values
Significant speed improvements if you have a lot of data in the tool
Assets can be set as inactive to be hidden
Introduction of the FI Net Worth
Better support of asset classes
Many small bug fixes

If you want to use the latest version, you can now use the docker image that I am publishing frequently. This docker image is what I use, so it should be fairly up-to-date. * budgetwarrior on docker hub <https://hub.docker.com/r/wichtounet/budgetwarrior>

Otherwise, you can of course compile it from the sources (another docker image is available as a build image). For this, you will need a very recent GCC (13+) or Clang (16+) compiler.

Most of the new features have been implemented a while ago, for my personal usage. The main recent changes are improvements in the code, related to using C++20 and C++23. I plan for all my projects to be compiled with C++23 by default. The reason is mostly so I can really learn about these features, since I cannot use them all at work. On that note, I was a bit disappointed by the support in clang, especially in libc++. I had to work around a few limitations in order to support clang.

The main C++20 feature that I am using in budgetwarrior is ranges. I have been able to improve many pieces of code from using loops and multiple ifs, to using a range. I have implemented many transforms and filters for budgetwarrior. And I am quite happy about the result. For instance:

bool budget::account_exists(const std::string& name){
        for(auto& account : all_accounts()){
                if(account.name == name){
                        return true;
                }
        }

        return false;
}

became:

bool budget::account_exists(const std::string& name){
        return !ranges::empty(all_accounts() | filter_by_name(name));
}

or here is another example of using ranges:

if (accounts.data() | not_id(id) | active_today | filter_by_name(account.name)) {
    throw budget_exception("There is already an account with the name " + account.name);
}

This is likely the biggest change, but I have made other improvements based on recent versions of C++:

Use of std::format
Use of the spaceship operator
Use of template lambdas
Use of std::string_view
Use of std::filesystem
Use of std::map::contains (and other such functions)

Overall, it was a lot of fun and I could significantly improve the code by using these new features (and more).

I am also taking advantage of clang-tidy now. I have added a clang-tidy configuration to my projects so that I can quickly check everything. I have also integrated clang-tidy in neovim (yes, I switched from vim to neovim, more on that later maybe) and this shows in real time where I could improve the code.

Finally, another change is that I am now taking advantage of Github Workflows. Every time I push to the repo, everything is compiled with the two compilers I support. This allows me to keep compatibility between both. In the future, I plan to add a few more tools to the workflows for code analysis. This is also an opportunity for me to learn about these workflows, which I never used before.

I am quite glad to be working on these projects again eve though I do not have much time. It was really fun to use all these new features in budgetwarrior. Next, I plan to refresh the code of ETL. And since I want to refresh my GPU skills as well, I will also work on etl_gpu_blas.

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C++23 Refresh and budgetwarrior 1.1.0