Programming Practices

Table of Contents

• Generalities
  • Common practices to avoid :

Generalities

This is about good programming practices : what to do and not in your programs. Suggestions about reliability, security, ...

Writing programming guidelines specific to a project is a long, tedious and and useless task while there are very good references on the subject.

Take the time, even slowly, to read and understand some references...

• C++ Core Guidelines by Bjarne Stroustrup and Herb Sutter;
• PRQA - High Integrity C++ Coding Standard Version 4.0
• LLVM Coding Style

Common practices to avoid :

Some common mistakes or bad practices :

• warnings are acceptable just while still debugging. Code in the master branch shall be free of warnings (same as errors). warnings in the released code is considered the same way as an error;
• code doing different things, even if related, shall be break down in different source files (modular programming);
• avoid duplication of source code. If you have the same piece of code doing the same thing in different places of the program, create a function;
• as in french language, words/symbols/tokens/operators shall be separated by spaces (clang-format may solve this...);
• meaningless (or wrong meaning) variable names;
• hard coding (using something like "# define SIZE 256") for parameters which can change with time or limit the usability of the program;
• lack of out of bounds checking;
• adequate error and exception handling;
• forgetting to remove "dead code" (some lines useful only while the code was being debugged/validated);
• incoherence over time : not doing the same thing the same way at different moments (it's hard on the long run, we know...);
• test your code as exhausstively as possible (it's hard, we know).