Where Should You Apply Various C++ Coding Practices?

Dr. Love asks: "C++ contains a mountain of features. I am searching for a good C++ coding practice - what language features to avoid, what language features to make extensive use of, etc. In my survey of C++ coding practices, there seems to be a plethora of philosophies ranging from the stingy to the highly abstracted and elaborate. By stingy, I'm referring to those that use few of C++'s advanced features, such as Mozilla. At the opposite end of the spectrum, there are elaborate practices that make extensive use of the STL, exceptions, RTTI, templates, etc. Those who prefer the simple implementations tend to argue that elaborate practices result in inefficient, unclear, and unportable code. Those who prefer the elaborate implementations tend to argue that simple implementations are missing out on a Nirvana of reuse and clean design. Are these arguments unfounded? What has been your experience with C++ coding guidelines? What does the industry expect?" Just like the choice of the language itself, the choice of the features you use in your language should lend itself to the task you are developing. Some projects don't need to use every single feature of C++ to get the job done, however use of those ignored features in other projects might make your life (and your code) much easier to handle.

Comments

Re:The one I keep running into: Polymorphism.

[StandardDeviant]

The Right Way to implement this is to make an abstract class for the tree node, write the tree manipulation methods to work with the abstract class, and make derived classes that store different types of data, with appropriate constructors that initialize the data fields. Anything that doesn't have to care about the data type can just manipulate the objects as the original abstract class.

This sounds like a perfect place to use the STL and/or C++'s templating mechanism. Trust me, I'm not a huge C++ fan, but the container classes in the STL kick ass (I imagine something like what you describe is already there). Even if the STL don't give you no lovin', templates (and references) make it really easy to write a storage class that works over an arbitrary range of types.

This is just my 2 cent's worth. I'm mainly a C guy too, but the STL was the single biggest thing tempting me to switch to C++.

There is good coverage of all this in Bruce Eckel's Thinking in C++ (and other such as the C++ Primer by Lajoie et al.) I mention Bruce Eckel's books because they're available to peruse online, his site is mindview.net which unfortunately seems to be down right now (maybe it's hosted in california ;-). I found a mirror of his C++ books in PDF form here and a mirror of all his books in HTML form here. If you're like me you'll read the book(s) online and end up liking them so much you want to own a paper copy (and here I make my standard reference to bookpool for discount tech books).

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