Guideline – Clean C++

2013-06-30

Interfaces done right

Interfaces are one of the backbones of modern, object-oriented design. You need to use instances of different classes which share similarities in a uniform way? Use interfaces. You cannot easily test a class because it depends on details of other classes? Make your class depend on interfaces instead and introduce mock objects. You have a class with a single responsibility, but a respectable amount of methods which are intended for different types of callers? Make your class implement several interfaces, and let different callers refer to the ones which suit their needs.

As you can see, interfaces used correctly are pretty powerful tools, and many programming languages such as Java and C# provide dedicated interface keywords. This is not the case for C++. This article explains how to write clean and safe interfaces for your classes.

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2013-01-30

Assignment operators in C++11

Move Semantics are a game changer on how we return values and pass arguments in C++11. In this post we concern ourselves with the best way to implement an assignment (‘=‘) operator. If rvalues and move semantics are all new for you, you might want to read Michael’s post I like to std::move it first.
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2013-01-16

Foobar names

foobar is a term one often encounters when searching the web for tutorials on programming. What it is supposed to mean is not really clear; some people, though, claim that it stems from the German word furchtbar, which translates as horrible. I am no authority on etymology, but whenever I see a tutorial using foo and bar as variable names, I think furchtbar is quite fitting.

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2013-01-12

May the FORs leave you alone

In his post may the FORs be with you, Michael mentioned that it’s best to avoid handwritten loops at all. This is not self explanatory for a lot of people, and while many arguments can be put forth to support the use of algorithms, in this post let’s stick with one: readabilty.
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2013-01-04

Expressing preconditions with invariants of parameter types

Everyone who has read Scott Meyer’s books knows: it is a good idea to make your code easy to use correctly and difficult to use incorrectly. In this light, we may be able to improve on the ifs we routinely use to check our functions’ preconditions.

The basic idea is to remove all the ifs that check for error conditions at the beginning of your function’s body by providing type parameters that already give sufficiently strong guarantees.

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