Appendix A - good practices

Memory Management

Memory managemet is pretty difficult topic in C++. The most important tools are smart pointers, which you can read about in part 6.

• every object has it's owner - std::unique_ptr
• if object really has to have multiple owners - std::shared_ptr
• to avoid cyclic references use std::weak_ptr
• every raw pointer in your codebase should be a non owning pointer

Classes

• do not overload operators, unless you really need to
• follow rule of zero and rule of five
• if your constructor accepts only 1 argument, mark it as explicit

Type Casting

• when casting object pointers, use dynamic_cast
• when casting other types (int, float, etc.) use static_cast
• never use reinterpret_cast or const_cast - if you need to use them that means you have a big problem in your codebase which and casting will only delay the issue

Other stuff I didn't know where to put

• do not use typedef, using is better