Simulating Infinity in Conway's Game of Life with Modern C++

"I had heard the rumors that C++ was a scary language filled with footguns and segmentation faults, but I had never given it a fair chance myself" - props for this. There's too much hearsay in software engineering.

Small nit, this - https://ryanjk5.github.io/assets/2026-05-14-GOLDE/torus.gif - is not what's conventionally referred to as a torus in CGoL. In torus left and right edges are also connected.

It seems like the thread_local CacheIndex only determines which cache to use, but it doesn't actually guarantee thread safety for concurrent access to the HashLifeCache itself. What would be a good solution for this?

Should I use a mutex for each cache instance? As a beginner developer, my guess is that the original author assumes data races won't occur based on the execution timing. However, I'm really not sure if that assumption is actually correct/safe.

Interesting approach. I like that the implementation focuses on scalability rather than only visualization.

This would be a cool template project to learn C++ without the pollution of LLM slop.

Fricking cool, I love it.