Category: Programming

Options for code reviews with Git

We’re thinking about switching to Git for my work, and I want to be confident we can still support good code reviews if we make the switch.

I am a big fan of in-person reviews, and for that, git difftool is enough but sometimes you need to do it asynchronously, and then you need a tool or a process or something.

Here are the options as I see them so far (please comment if you know others I should consider):

  1. Emailing patches. Git has git format-patch and git bundle that allow creating a file containing changes that can be sent by email or message. These can be reviewed as patches or applied to the working tree and reviewed in context.
  2. Feature branch and pull request. Devs to push their changes to a branch in a shared repo and send an email or message asking a colleague to pull the branch. The reviewer looks at the changes in the repo or pulls them, then either sends back comments, or merges the branch into their own and delivers to the master branch.
  3. Tools. There are several extra tools that sit in front of Git and deliver changes when they are reviewed. These include: Gerrit, Critic, Review Board.

References:

Best GCC warning flags for compiling C++

A recent discussion on ACCU-general gave people an opportunity to share the warning flags they like to use with g++.

I thought I’d write down the consensus as I understood it, mainly for my own reference:

-Wredundant-decls
-Wcast-align
-Wmissing-declarations
-Wmissing-include-dirs
-Wswitch-enum
-Wswitch-default
-Wextra
-Wall
-Werror
-Winvalid-pch
-Wredundant-decls
-Wmissing-prototypes
-Wformat=2
-Wmissing-format-attribute
-Wformat-nonliteral

We were advised by Jonathan Wakely that -Weffc++ is not very useful since it is mostly based on the first edition of the book Effective C++, many of whose recommendations were improved in the second edition, and also apparently GCC doesn’t do a great job of warning about them.

Update: thanks to an article[1] by Roger Orr in CVu these flags are highly recommended in GCC 5.2+:

-flto
-Wodr

[1] Orr, Roger “One Definition Rule“, in CVu Volume 27, Issue 5 p16 (editor: Steve Love)

What is node.js?

Node.js is a way of writing your web applications wholly in JavaScript, which sounds like a terrible idea.

However, it is also an asynchronous programming environment that has been proven to scale really well, and it’s a collection of libraries many of which are excitingly small and well-encapsulated.

Here we just cover the basics of what it is:

Slides: What is node.js?

Simple template programming

C++ template meta-programming sounds harder than it is.

So long as you can fight through some horrific syntax and understand recursive functions, you can write any algorithm you like and have it run at compile time in your C++ programs.

Slides: Simple Template Programming

Andrei Alexandrescu’s amazing book on using template meta-programming for really useful, cool stuff is: Modern C++ Design.