On a similar note, I've been working on a QR code generator in Minecraft using redstone (the in-game equivalent of circuits), it has both been rather interesting and very painful to create. Definitely a great way to gain experience. I'll probably finish the project sometime this week.
OT. Does anyone know of a good open source library to read "Data Matrix" 2d barcodes? The ones I found are either broken or extremely slow. The frustrating part is that there seem to be many mobile phone apps which can do it just fine, but I want to run this in my own code on my desktop machine, so each barcode can trigger an appropriate action.
<i>you should obviously never use assembly for this type of project/application.</i><p>...unless you're working in certain types of embedded development, where rewriting code in Asm to save going to the next larger size of device is a semi-common occurrence.<p>I'm not really familiar with ARM Asm so I can't easily point out optimisation opportunities like I can with x86, but would like to see a size comparison with a stripped-down C implementation (of similar capability) put through a compiler.