Olivier Langlois's blog

It is a very interesting book. Anyone having been involved in a large scale software development projects will recognize typical problems often seen in this type of projects while reading this book and by experience we have developed an intuition about how to deal with the complexity inherent to large scale projects. Mr Lakos book is the first, to my knowledge, that address this subject and it formalize extremely well the problems of large scale projects and propose a methodology and principles to apply to keep the development and maintainability of these projects manageable. It is a very refreshing C++ book and I recommend it to any C++ professionals not having read it yet.

The most interesting chapters in my opinion are chapter 5 and chapter 6. Chapter 5 presents refactoring methods to remove cyclical dependencies among components, reduce inter dependencies and how to layout components into software layers that will ease reusability and maintainability. Chapter 6 discuss about component insulation. Its difference with encapsulation, the benefits of component insulation and its cost and when it is wise to avoid insulation.

While I was integrating a fix to a bug that has been reported to me by Daniel Quadros in my primality testing C++ module and also adding gcc asm support to it. I used that opportunity to rework my C++ source code to HTML converter. The 2 things that I added to the converter are:

• replace the usage of the <font> tags with <span> tags in combination of CSS classes
• size optimization of the converted document

The size optimization came from the very simple observation that my converter was stateless and was not recognizing when multiple consecutive sections sharing the same colors were processed. I just added a small FSM to my converter to keep track of the current state and the converter now close the current tag only if there is a transition to a new color. The most impressive result came from my DCEL C++ file with a 25% file size reduction!

Also, I am just starting to appreciate to power of CSS. I will now be able to change the code snippet colors across my whole website by just updating a small CSS file. As a side bonus by having switched from the <font> tags to <span>, I can now use my C++ highlight feature in the code snippets contained in this blog as the blog engine was forbiding using <font> tags on posts but allows <span>.