The Bench Software Development Kit (The SDK) is a collection of libraries and applications aimed to ease the development of 3D multimedia applications for Windows XP computers.

TODO: The SDK does not yet exist.

The SDK provides a Powerful Userspace Coroutine Scheduling System to enable convenient asynchronous programming. If you want something to happen once per second, fire a coroutine with a loop, and call Sleep in it:

If you want to do something once per frame, fire a coroutine with a loop and Sleep(1).

	StartCoroutine([](CoroutineHandle coro, void* userdata) {
		for (;;) {
			printf("tic\n");
			Sleep(coro, 1.0);
			printf("tac\n");
			Sleep(coro, 1.0);
		}
	});

Coroutines are also leveraged for async I/O:

	StartCoroutine([](CoroutineHandle coro, void* userdata) {
		File file = FileOpen("file.txt");

		char buf[32] = {};
		
		// FileReadAsync will yield, and the coroutine will be resumed
		// after the read asynchronously completes.
		I32 nread = FileReadAsync(coro, file, 32, buf);

		buf[31] = '\0';
		printf("%s\n", buf);
	}, nullptr);

Currently this is the only officially supported setup. On Visual Studio 2022 you can still install a Windows XP-compatible compiler (). This has the following trade-offs:

• ✔️Works out of the box with Visual Studio
• ✔️Reasonably modern compiler
• ❌No C++20 support (basically no named initializers)
• ❌Modern Windows SDK and CRT are quite bloated - an empty statically linked executable with vs141_xp is ~200KB, while with an older Windows Vista SDK it's ~60KB

TODO: In the future we plan to have a template project, but right now you have to go through the Visual Studio Library Linking Ritual, explained below:

1. From the Visual Studio Installer, select "C++ Windows XP Support for VS 2017 (v141) tools"
2. Create a new solution with either "C++ Console Application" or "Win32 Application"
3. Add the Bench SDK as a subdirectory to your project
4. File > Add > Existing Project, and select bench/proj/vs2017/bench.vcxproj
5. Configure your game's project:
   • Switch from x64 to x86 - x64 is not supported at this point in time as it won't run on my 2004 laptop
   • Configuration Properties/
     • General/
       • Windows SDK Version: 10 (or something else, but make sure it matches the bench SDK library's)
       • Platform Toolset: Visual Studio 2017 - Windows XP (v141_xp)
     • C++/
       • General/
         • Additional Include Directories - Add $(SolutionDir)bench\
       • Preprocessor/
         • Add BENCH_WIN32 define
       • Code Generation
         • Runtime Library - for Debug configuration, "Multi-threaded Debug (/MTd)", and for Release configuration: "Multi-threaded (/MT)"
     • Linker/
       • General/
         • Additional Library Directories: Add $(OutDir)
       • Input/
         • Additional Dependencies: Add bench.lib

If you're feeling adventurous and want to build with another compiler/build system, it should be fairly simple (unless you're targeting XP, which is not covered here and will involve hair pulling).

1. Create a executable in your build system
2. Add all the .cpp files into your build - either directly as part of your project, or as a separate library
3. Add BENCH_WIN32 define (for forward compatibility)
4. Add the Bench SDK's root folder as an include directory (so <bench/*> includes resolve)