Chapter 5. Implementations

For the most part, coming up with appropriate definitions for your classes (and class templates) and appropriate declarations for your functions (and function templates) is the lion's share of the battle. Once you've got those right, the corresponding implementations are largely straightforward. Still, there are things to watch out for. Defining variables too soon can cause a drag on performance. Overuse of casts can lead to code that's slow, hard to maintain, and infected with subtle bugs. Returning handles to an object's internals can defeat encapsulation and leave clients with dangling handles. Failure to consider the impact of exceptions can lead to leaked resources and corrupted data structures. Overzealous inlining can cause code bloat. Excessive coupling can result in unacceptably long build times.

All of these problems can be avoided. This chapter explains how.