Basics of Clean C++

Abstract

As I have explained in Chapter 1, lots of C++ code out there is not clean. In many projects, software entropy has gotten the upper hand. Even if you are dealing with an ongoing development project, for example, with a piece of software under maintenance, large parts of the code base are often very old. The code looks as if it were written in the last century. This is not surprising, since most of that code was literally written in the last century! There are many projects with a long lifecycle, and they have their roots in the 1990s or even the 1980s. Furthermore, many programmers copy code snippets out of legacy projects and modify them to get things done in their daily work.