Cpp

‘Unit Testing’ Complex Systems

I was e-mailed by a co-worker the other week asking for advice on how to test a new feature that was implemented solely using private member functions and inaccessible objects within an existing system. It’s an interesting question that people often struggle with when trying…

Simplifying the Flag Set

In the last few posts, I’ve covered the development of a type safe and easy to use flag set, and as a result it now contains 3 required template parameters, two of which declare default values.

template <
          typename TEnum,
          int TMaxFlags = 8…

Type Safe Flags in C++

Using bits and shifting enums is a pretty standard way of storing and reading flags. It’s quick, it’s compact and the syntax isn’t to difficult to pick up for people who haven’t seen it before. But since a bit is only a bit and an enum is only an enum it’s far to easy to make mistakes…

Deque Memory Management

I’ve wanted to blog more about our internal STL implementation for a while and one of the interesting things I wanted…

Testing Objects with the Same Behaviour

One of the most difficult things when it comes to unit testing is cutting down on the number of duplicated tests. In the past I’ve often developed objects which have very different implementations but externally produce very similar results (for example when…

The Evils of Unity Builds

Unity builds. I don’t like them.

Of all the tools at your disposal to make a build faster, this is the worst. And it’s not just the “hey let’s #include .cpp files” weirdness, but the way that it can make a well structure, modular code base become worse than…

Over-Thinking Helper Functions

SAFE_DELETE and SAFE_FREE.

What do those functions (macros?) say to you? What if you also have over-ridden calls to DELETE and FREE too?

I think most people see a safe delete function as one that handles a null pointer…