STL algorithms are a fantastic set of tool to improve expressiveness and correctness of your code. As outlined in Sean Parent’s famous talk C++ Seasoning the reality is quite straightforward: one needs to know his algorithms. This post explains you how STL algorithms are to be used, and what they can bring to you. Algorithms versus for loops […]
In this post I would like to propose a technique based on levels of abstraction to transform an obscure piece of code into expressive and elegant one. You’ve been quite a few to take up the Christmas Break Challenge for writing expressive code, by posting a comment on the challenge post or by chipping in on Reddit. […]
Before you go away on holidays and feast on Christmas and New Year’s eve parties, I want to propose you a challenge about writing expressive code to keep your skills up during the holidays period. I’m going to show you the code for a simple task performed by an application. I’m even going to explain that code to you. […]
As software developers, we get to learn many good practices and strive to apply them in our code. For instance we learn the importance of good naming of variables and functions, encapsulation, class cohesion, the usage of polymorphism, conciseness, readability, code clarity and expressiveness, and many others. What if there was only one principle to […]
In this post in the series about strong types, we focus on the need for passing strong types by reference. This is a fairly common use case for strong types, since passing arguments by reference is so common, but I haven’t seen this aspect of strong types treated anywhere else yet. This post is part of the following series: […]
Strong types are a popular topic in the C++ community. In this post I want to focus specifically on how they can be used to make interfaces clearer and more robust. This post in the second one in the series on strong types: Strongly typed constructors Strong types for strong interfaces Passing strong types by reference Strong […]
This is the first post of a series on the topic of expressive types, that is, types that express what they represent, rather than how they are implemented. By carrying meaning, these types improve the readability and safety of the code. Here is the series about strong types: Strongly typed constructors Strong types for strong interfaces Passing […]
Clearer interfaces with optional<T> showed what optional<T> was, and how to make interfaces clearer by using it as a return type. If you’re not familiar with optional, I would recommend you to read it first. Here I present a example of using optional as an argument, to leverage on its “not set” semantic. The need we’ll work […]
In Make your functions functional, we saw that it was preferable to have functions return objects by value, for code clarity. Now to avoid incurring performance costs by doing this, the compiler can optimize away the copies related to the return by value, if you respect a few simple rules. This post describes these optimizations and shows […]
The need for representing a value that is “empty”, “null”, or “not set” arises regularly in code but often leads to clumsy or brittle solutions. This need may appear with a function that needs to return a value but may not be able to compute it in all cases. In this case, several solutions are […]
