BEbertr4nd·Oct 28, 2020
One of the reasons it’s hard to talk about clean C++ codebases is that there’s a huge range of possible complexity. The gap between “Solve a particular problem” and “provide a generic library” is very big. Template metaprogramming deservedly gets a lot of the blame, but implicit heap management via constructors/destructors is also pretty hard to follow.
The upshot is that “professional grade” C++ is often impenetrable (I tried to understand the implementation of boost::intrusive_list once. Yikes.)
LLVM is often cited as a very clean codebase and I think that holds up. Facebook’s folly is another good one (although it occasionally dives into template metaprogramming madness).
Hopefully I’ll be forgiven for also plugging a few projects I used to work on, that might hit a sweet spot between utility and code complexity:
- Glow, a compiler
Read the rest
for neural networks: https://github.com/pytorch/glow
- ReDex, a bytecode optimizer for Android: https://github.com/facebook/redex
There was a nice blog post a few years back called “c++11 is a scripting language” that is unfortunately offline now; it did some task like reading lines from a file and sorting them, and it wasn’t dramatically more complicated than the same thing in Python. It’s worth doing a few of those kinds of exercises to get a feeling for the language.