Question

So I’ve been developing a UI toolkit for the past year, and my Window class has gotten to a point where the size of the class (through sizeof) is 540 bytes).

I was thinking, that since not all windows have children, I might split parts of the code that handles having children (its alignment etc) into a separate class and have a pointer to it. Same goes with texts, icons, and scrolling etc.

Is this recommended practice or is there anything I’m blatantly missing?

Answer 1

First, the size of an object instance in itself doesn’t really matter. The class should be designed to have a single responsibility, and if that requires 540 bytes of data, then so be it.

However, 540 bytes is a unusually big number. It’s 135 integers or pointers. It’s something like 22 std::vectors. I have a hard time imagining that so many objects can be required for a single area of responsibility. But again, the size itself isn’t the problem. The problem is if your class is responsible for more than it should.

I was thinking, that since not all windows have children, I might split parts of the code that handles having children (its alignment etc) into a separate class and have a pointer to it. Same goes with texts, icons, and scrolling etc.

It sounds like you’ve basically got a single EverythingUI class. And yes, that is bad design. Split it up for that reason. Handling of text has nothing to do with handing of icons or scrolling or… Put them in different classes.