Beautiful C++: 30 Core Guidelines for Writing Clean, Safe, and Fast Code

Chapter 4.5

T.1: Use templates to raise the level of abstraction of code

Story time

In 2012 I facilitated a code review with a colleague, let’s call her Beth, which I set aside as a useful example of the field. The purpose of the function was to take a selection of icons arranged in a row along the bottom of the screen and spin through them by an arbitrary amount. We had just migrated to C++11.

After half an hour of hacking away at it, the function looked like this, having lost about a dozen spurious lines of code:

Click here to view code image

UIComponent* spin_cards(UIComponent* first, UIComponent* n_first, UIComponent* last) { if (first == n_first) return last; if (n_first == last) return first; UIComponent* write = first; UIComponent* next_read ...