Maintainability, Readability, Performance – What are we optimizing for?
We (as a community) write C++ mainly for two reasons:
- Because our toolchain, community forces us to use it (library X is written in C++, examples are in C++, our co-workers use it)
- For performance reasons
While writing the code, we might optimize for different goals:
- Maintainability (will I be able to change this code in 5 years? Will someone else be able to change the code now, if I can't do it?)
- Readability (In some sense, this might be a subset of Maintainability? What's the difference?)
- Correctness (avoiding errors. avoiding potnetially critical things, avoiding memory leaks, etc)
- …
The presentation might be rather short (10-15 min maybe?), topics:
- introduce the terminology
- relationships
- What to do, if you want to break one goal?
- Some example ideas like DRY, KISS, …
After that a rather open discussion would be really awesome.
Especially to help possible later talks to better target needs.