Exploring Modern C++ Design: MemCache++ Case Study

MemCache++ is a light-weight, type-safe, simple to use and full-featured Memcache client. It was developed by Dean Michael Berris who is a C++ fanatic and currently works at Google Australia. He also is part of the Google delegation to the ISO C++ Committee.

Studying the well-designed libraries is recommended to elevate your  C++ design and implementation skills, and the goal of this article is to discover some memcache++ design choices that make it easy to understand and use. Continue reading “Exploring Modern C++ Design: MemCache++ Case Study”

Don’t touch to my C++ code.

Back to 2005  when I  worked in a company where most of the code was developed in C++, in 2006 the managers decide to develop the new projects with C# and also migrate some C++ projects to C#, here were  their arguments against C++:

  • C++ is too complex.
  • The C++ build system is too difficult to manage and maintain.
  • C++ is stagnated for many years and it’s on its way to dying.
  • It becomes very difficult to recruit a C++ developer.

Continue reading “Don’t touch to my C++ code.”

Being a Productive C++ Developer Without Internet

As developer, How many times during a day you need to ask google for something related to your work? How to use a library? Is there a fix for an encountered problem?

Maybe the answer is at least once a day.

Currently and as developers, the internet saves us a lot of time. Whatever the problem you have, just search the right keywords in google and instantly and in many cases you have a result that matches your need. Continue reading “Being a Productive C++ Developer Without Internet”

Visualizing C/C++ Projects: The Power of Pictures

A picture is worth a thousand words” is an English idiom. It refers to the notion that a complex idea can be conveyed with just a single still image or that an image of a subject conveys its meaning or essence more effectively than a description does.

This idiom could also be applied in software programming. Indeed you can easilly understand a mini project when exploring its source code. However a big project become complex and not easy to understand.  In such cases it’s better to visualize the source code using graphs and diagrams to assist the developers understanding the source code. Continue reading “Visualizing C/C++ Projects: The Power of Pictures”

C++ Algorithm Evolution: A Historical Flashback

Before the initial standardization in 1998, C++ was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup at Bell Labs since 1979, as an extension of the C language as he wanted an efficient and flexible language similar to C

In 1983, “C with Classes” was renamed to “C++” , adding new features that included virtual functions, function name and operator overloading, references, constants, type-safe free-store memory allocation (new/delete), improved type checking. Continue reading “C++ Algorithm Evolution: A Historical Flashback”

Tracking the hidden duplicate code in a C++ code base.

It’s known that the presence of duplicate code has negative impacts on software development and maintenance. Indeed a major drawback is when  an instance of duplicate code is changed for fixing bugs or adding new features, its correspondents have to be changed simultaneously.

The most popular reason of duplicate code is the Copy/Paste operations, and in this case the source code is exactly similar  in two or more places , this practice is discouraged in many articles, books, and web sites.However,  sometimes it’s not easy to practice the recommendations, and the developer chose the easy solution: the  Copy/Paste method. Continue reading “Tracking the hidden duplicate code in a C++ code base.”

C++20 Concepts: Eliminating Generics Paradigm Drawbacks

As Bjarne Stroustrup points out, “C++ is a multi-paradigmed language.” It supports many different styles of programs, or paradigms, and object-oriented programming is only one of these. Some of the others are structured programming, and generic programming. In the last few years C++ experts like Andrei Alexandrescu, Scott Meyers and Herb Sutter promotes the uses of the generic programming and they qualify it as Modern C++ Design.

Here’s what say Andrei Alexandrescu about the Modern C++ design:

Modern C++ Design defines and systematically uses generic components - highly flexible design artifacts that are mixable and matchable to obtain rich behaviors with a small, orthogonal body of code.

Three assertions are interesting in his point of view: Continue reading “C++20 Concepts: Eliminating Generics Paradigm Drawbacks”