Design principles are guidelines about how to organize and structure our code to make it manageable. They come through experience, in the general sense of the word. It can be one individual’s own trial and errors that makes them realize what options make code more simple. But in the more general sense, design principles stem […]
In order to write code that is understandable, maintainable and that stands the test of time, one of the crucial skills that we all need to have is design. What does code design mean? In my definition, doing code design means deciding which class (or more generally which component) is in charge of which responsibility. […]
Have you ever struggled to understand a codebase that was bigger than you? Most of us go through this experience more or less often in our career, and this is not a simple thing to do. Chances are you’re in this situation right now. During one occurence of the Software Craftsmanship meetup somebody was asking for advice […]
Defining a variadic pack of arguments of the same type turns out to be a deep topic as this is the fifth post and seventh technique we (I or guest writer Tobias in Part 4) discover on this topic. C++ variadic templates allow to define a parameters pack with any number of parameters of any […]
Inserting elements in a vector sounds like the most basic use case we can think of when it comes to using collections in C++. Nevertheless, this is a complex topic in itself, because std::vector offers various ways to insert several elements. Choosing the most appropriate depending on your exact use case allows to write more expressive […]
Even though very convenient to write concise code, temporaries are an endless source of bugs in C++. Are we allowed to use a temporary in a range based for loop? Consider the following code: std::vector<int> create_range() { return {1, 2, 3, 4, 5}; } int main() { for (auto const& value : create_range()) { std::cout […]
With C++17, modern C++ has acquired a nullable object: std::optional. optional has a pretty rich interface, in particular when it comes to handling null optionals. On the other hand, the oldest nullable type in C++, pointers, doesn’t have any helper to make the handling of its nullity more expressive. Let’s see what we can do […]
Some STL algorithms have a default behaviour and also accept a custom value in order to have a custom behaviour. For example, std::sort orders the elements of a collection based on comparisons with operator< by default, but it also accepts a custom function to perform comparisons: std::sort(begin(v), end(v), std::greater{}); // sorts v in descending order This is the […]
Among the many features that C++17 introduced, the standard library got std::conjunction and its brother (or is it a sister?) std::disjunction. std::conjunction allows to perform a logical AND on a variadic pack of boolean values, and std::disjunction a logical OR: std::conjunction<Bs…>::value // is true if all Bs… are true, false otherwise std::disjunction<Bs…>::value // is true if at least one […]
If you’re working with legacy code, chances are some of the areas of code you’re in charge of have a design that is less than ideal. But if you’ve been working with it for a while, you may be able to navigate this code with ease, and maybe you don’t even see its little weirdnesses […]
