Using a factory is a common pattern when we are working with polymorphic objects. It exists to solve a very basic issue in C++: in order to construct something you must name its type. But the entire point of runtime polymorphism is often that we cannot name the type, because... [Read More]

If you haven’t seen Herb Sutter’s recent talk at CppCon 2015 “Writing Good C++… by Default”, you should. It’s a great talk that largely discusses static analysis and various types of safety. In particular, he discusses lifetime safety: the risk that objects, particularly non-owning views such as references, pointers,... [Read More]

In last week’s post I discussed how one could simplify the task of allocating memory for several arrays simultaneously; a joint allocation. This function was nice in that it automatically performed a nice amount of pointer arithmetic. What was not so nice was the fact that the result was not... [Read More]

This post was inspired by my recent view of this YouTube. The video is by a gentleman by the name of Jon Blow, who’s talking about a new language for game development. I’m not going to talk much about the video except to use some of the goals and code presented as... [Read More]

Sometimes in C++, an object has something that we want. We don’t want to be honest citizens and put in the hard work of copying. Instead we want to steal the something away from the object, and let the object deal. The mechanism we use for this is move semantics.... [Read More]