Monday, May 16, 2016

C++ as it is meant to be used


There are two things that are the biggest blessing as well as the biggest curse for C++

A) It is (almost perfectly) backward compatible with C

Perhaps nothing else ensured its success, but it also means that people tend to clump together the two as C/C++ and for most C++ is learned after prior exposure to C. This only leads to folks using C++ as a better C, bringing in all the bad habits :
  • Globals - In C it's impossible to avoid them, but they can and should be avoided in C++ ( Why? )
  • Manual memory management - For every flower there's a bee, For every fruit there's a tree, but unfortunately for every malloc() there's not always a free(). The paranoia of the bugs caused by this led the designers of Java to opt for garbage collection instead (Of course they forgot that memory is not the only resource that needs to be managed!!). In C++ we have tools for the job - Deterministic finalization means we can use RAII classes or simply use auto pointers to ensure matched allocation and deallocation. In fact, most of the time, you can simply use a std::string as a buffer. Google does it in their protocol buffer code - If it's good enough for google it's good enough for me. In the past few years I can't recall having used new or delete[] for buffers (or even for objects for that matter)
  • Using the C functions - using strcpy(), printf(), scanf(), and their brethren is a surefire way to induce vulnerabilities and bugs. C++ gives you a nice string, stream I/O and if you use boost, you can use type safe code like the lexical_cast and the format library.
    It is this C legacy which leads to insecure and fragile code.


B) It is labeled "Object Oriented"

Destructors, Encapsulation, Operator overloading and Pure abstract classes are quite useful features - Especially destructors, without with RAII would be impossible.

However, I'm not much of a fan of the OO bandwagon. OO has it's conveniences and good points, but in emphasizing it above all else, there is too much hype. It really does not give you much of a new way of looking at problem solving unless you opt for pure message passing style OO like Smalltalk
Most of day to day OO usage could be very well done in C - Think of the stdio.h functions or most of the Win32 API that take an opaque FILE* or HANDLE respectively. I tend to agree with this gentleman's opinion on the matter.



What does good C++ look like?

In my opinion, minimum reliance on code that you have written, and maximum use of well written libraries ( I refer to the STL and boost ). Even if it makes the code only readable by someone more experienced - No one said C++ is an easy language.

Some rules of thumb that I tend to follow
  • Use containers instead of C arrays
  • Use string rather than char* buffers
  • Avoid new and malloc()
  • Avoid explicit loops over data when possible, use copy(), transform() etc.
  • Avoid pointers as much as possible
  • Avoid functions that take varargs ... arguments
  • Once again - do not reinvent the wheel, unless you need a square one, it's been done before, there's always a well written library out there with the functionality you need.

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