C++ Core Guidelines Explained: Best Practices for Modern C++

Chapter 17

Architectural Ideas

The first support section is quite short. It has only three rules, with a few sentences of content for each one. Their focus is programming-language agnostic, and they remind me of the philosophical chapter.

A.1 Separate stable code from less stable code

Here is the sentence from the C++ Core Guidelines: “Isolating less stable code facilitates its unit testing, interface improvement, refactoring, and eventual deprecation.” What does that mean?

Putting an interface between stable and less stable code is a way to separate it. Due to the interface, your less stable code becomes a kind of subsystem, which you can test or refactor in isolation. You can now test not only the subsystem but also the integration of the ...