Solitaire written in C for terminal

[urban kestrel]

I wrote a Solitaire game in C that I'm kinda proud of but since I'm learning on my own I don't really know all the best ways to do things and one big giveaway is that the whole game is in one file that is a little bit over 1k lines.

This was originally ment to be a simple project that I was gonna use to learn vim motions and it evolved much further then I originally thought. And when I realised it it was too late to separate the whole game in to different files. Not that it's not possible but it's just a skill issue.

Here's the game repo I just created: https://github.com/d0mb1/solitaire-c

There are two screenshots of what the game looks like, one of the nerd fonts that the game relies on, binaries and the source code itself.

[steady bobcat]

Looks pretty good. What standard of C are you compiling with? You’re using an empty initializer which is a C23 feature or GNU extension. If you choose to use C23 then you can use constexpr instead of those preprocessor defines.
Some of these comments seem pretty redundant, like the comment “shuffling” on the call to shuffle.
No need to call srand twice, especially since time(NULL) will probably be the same both calls. If you want better randomness I wouldn’t use rand at all tbh.
You’ve got a bunch of magic numbers in the bounds of your loops, which makes it harder to grasp what your code is intending to do

One file is fine, especially since all the code is related. At most, you could split up the card definitions, but there’s not really any other place to split it up

[urban kestrel]

I normally use write "gcc solitaire.c -o solitaire". When I write gcc --version I get "Apple clang version 16.0.0".
The time NULL is an oversight. The shuffle function is there twice because the deck isn't shuffled perfectly for the first time and the start/end (not sure which anymore) of the deck is the same each time.

[urban kestrel]

What should I use insted of rand?

[steady bobcat]

I don’t have any on hand, since I’m not by my computer, but you should be able to just search up some alternatives. It’s just a bad function to use since quality varies by system and is generally bad

[urban kestrel]

Oh ok, good to know. Thanks ❤️

[steady bobcat]

Ah, then yeah you’re using a GNU standard, probably gnu11 or gnu17. That’s perfectly fine, although I’d specify a version flag just to get consistent behavior across compilers and versions

[urban kestrel]

Isn't that something that I would specify in a makefile of some sort? I never really dealt with these thing since the only thing I really cared for was to have a compiler that compiles my code and them that I'm able to run that code.

[celest cedar]

You can do that aswell. In a CMakeList for example

[urban kestrel]

I'd rather not deal with CMake tbh. Never used it but also never heard anything good about it. So if I don't want to deal with CMake then I just put the flag in the gcc command? Also I've seen some stuff about using zig as a compiler? Would that work better?

[steady bobcat]

You can use zig if you want. It’s a frontend for clang with different defaults

If you don’t want to deal with any build system just a simple shell script will do tbh