What are some easy ways to improve the quality of your C plus plus code?

Answer 1

One of the easiest ways to improve your code quality is to keep your comments to a minimum. Use a verbose comment to introduce your code, summarising its purpose and features, but try and keep the code itself as comment-free as possible. This way, the reader can follow the flow of the code without constant interruption from the programmer. Comments within your code should only be used to clarify anything that is unclear, without simply restating what the code does. That is, what the code does is explained by the code itself, but it isn't always clear why the code does what it does.

If a verbose comment is required in order to explain the purpose of a particular line of code, try rewriting that line in such a way that it becomes clearer from the code itself. Make good use of whitespace to make it clearer what's going on. Good code should also be largely self-documenting, so if the logic is obfuscated by a complex series of statements, place those statements in separate functions with meaningful names so that the code documents itself more easily. Using functions in this way costs nothing since simple functions will be inline expanded by the compiler.

Avoid code duplication at all costs. Rewriting the same code over and over, or copy/pasting code, leads to increased maintenance and error-prone code whenever that code needs to be altered. Even if the code has slight differences there are usually ways to generalise the code either as a single function call, or a series of function calls to cater for differences. This greatly reduces maintenance costs because any changes to a particular call need only be made in one function, rather than every location that uses the code. With C++ this concept extends to objects as well. Make good use of inheritance and abstraction to provide more specialised versions of your generic code.

These are probably the simplest methods to improve the quality of your code. Ultimately, the quality of your code is determined by your consistency and your style. That is, stick to common conventions as much as possible. Ensure all your objects obey the one-resource-per-object rule. Objects that mutate multiple resources are a design flaw which will only lead to problems further down the line.