Toasty's blog

Spells from a file

I was initially a little shocked that as of 2026, C++'s standard library doesn't provide a means to watch files for changes. But after thinking about it for a few seconds, it seems to require a third party library in a lot of other languages/environments too. Okay, so I guess that's something I needed to learn.

I plan to support all the important operating systems—Arch, Debian, Ubuntu, er, Linux Mint perhaps, and maybe some others—so I started learning the inotify API. It's actually very simple and I feel silly for not having used it before. Moreover the man pages are informative, even including some example code. OK, so there's no excuse left.

I need to think about some of the game-specific details, but Gealdor now has the means to watch filesystem changes. This will complement the socket server, but is also going to be much more useful in development (I suspect).

I get it, it's a bit dull, but sometimes progress is.