Question

We are producing a portable code (win+macOs) and we are looking at how to make the code more rubust as it crashes every so often… (overflows or bad initializations usually) 🙁

I was reading that Google Chrome uses a process for every tab so if something goes wrong then the program does not crash compleatelly, only that tab. I think that is quite neat, so i might give it a go!

So i was wondering if someone has some tips, help, reading list, comment, or something that can help me build more rubust c++ code (portable is always better).

In the same topic i was also wondering if there is a portable library for processes (like boost)?

Well many Thanks.

Answer 1

I’ve developed on numerous multi-platform C++ apps (the largest being 1.5M lines of code and running on 7 platforms — AIX, HP-UX PA-RISC, HP-UX Itanium, Solaris, Linux, Windows, OS X). You actually have two entirely different issues in your post.

1. Instability. Your code is not stable. Fix it.

   • Use unit tests to find logic problems before they kill you.
   • Use debuggers to find out what’s causing the crashes if it’s not obvious.
   • Use boost and similar libraries. In particular, the pointer types will help you avoid memory leaks.

2. Cross-platform coding.

   • Again, use libraries that are designed for this when possible. Particularly for any GUI bits.
   • Use standards (e.g. ANSI vs gcc/MSVC, POSIX threads vs Unix-specific thread models, etc) as much as possible, even if it requires a bit more work. Minimizing your platform specific code means less overall work, and fewer APIs to learn.
   • Isolate, isolate, isolate. Avoid in-line #ifdefs for different platforms as much as possible. Instead, stick platform specific code into its own header/source/class and use your build system and #includes to get the right code. This helps keep the code clean and readable.
   • Use the C99 integer types if at all possible instead of ‘long’, ‘int’, ‘short’, etc — otherwise it will bite you when you move from a 32-bit platform to a 64-bit one and longs suddenly change from 4 bytes to 8 bytes. And if that’s ever written to the network/disk/etc then you’ll run into incompatibility between platforms.

Personally, I’d stabilize the code first (without adding any more features) and then deal with the cross-platform issues, but that’s up to you. Note that Visual Studio has an excellent debugger (the code base mentioned above was ported to Windows just for that reason).