Programming language

Many programming languages are suitable to write traffic simulations. Here are some comments about the most common ones:

• C - ``small'' language; fast; objects are available via struct but no further object support; in general very little support for things that one needs for agent-based simulation

• C++ - ``big'' language that few people know completely (i.e. significant risk that one writes code that nobody can read); object-oriented language with decent support for agent-based simulation; good support for high performance computing in particular for object-oriented numerics; no standardized support for graphical user interfaces.

• java - similar to C++; includes support for graphical user interfaces. Well-written code in java is not necessarily slower than code in C++, but there is in general less support for high performance computing (parallel compilers; debugging of parallel code; object-oriented numerics; ...).

• fortran - comes from the tradition of numerical analysis; newer versions of fortran have some support for agent-based simulation but no comparison to C++ or java

Recommendation: C++ or java, depending on own experience.

In the following, we will often give examples in C++ style. The goal is not to push C++ to its limits (as said above, in our experience very few people can read and maintain the resulting code) but to end up with design patterns that hopefully help average programmers. We will use the Standard Template Library (STL) where we feel that this is helpful.