Question

There are a few things that I almost always do when I put a class together in C++.

1) Virtual Destructor 2) Copy constructor and assignment operator (I either implement them in terms of a private function called Copy(), or declare them private and thus explicitly disallow the compiler to auto generate them).

What things do you find are almost always useful?

Answer 1

I find turning on the gcc flags -Wall, -Werror, and (this is the fun one) -Weffc++ help catch a lot of potential problems. From the gcc man page:

  -Weffc++ (C++ only)       Warn about violations of the following style guidelines from Scott       Meyers’ Effective C++ book:        ·   Item 11:  Define a copy constructor and an assignment operator           for classes with dynamically allocated memory.        ·   Item 12:  Prefer initialization to assignment in constructors.        ·   Item 14:  Make destructors virtual in base classes.        ·   Item 15:  Have 'operator=' return a reference to *this.        ·   Item 23:  Don’t try to return a reference when you must return           an object.        and about violations of the following style guidelines from Scott       Meyers’ More Effective C++ book:        ·   Item 6:  Distinguish between prefix and postfix forms of incre-           ment and decrement operators.        ·   Item 7:  Never overload '&&', '││', or ','.        If you use this option, you should be aware that the standard       library headers do not obey all of these guidelines; you can use       grep -v to filter out those warnings.