Better Code: Runtime Polymorphism

Git walk through of the C++ code presented in Sean Parent's talk Better Code: Runtime Polymorphism.

Casual C++ programmers or CS undergrads will be familiar with the object-oriented code up to the "slide 13" commit. The use of the C++11 feature std::shared_ptr may be new and the memory leak fixed in "slide 13 (leak fix)" may cause a mild surprise. The subsequent transformations go on to show the true power of new C++ features (C++11 and C++14) and the result is very client friendly code (at the price of the library containing some albeit convoluted gobbledygook C++ boilerplate).

The git commits of this repository are labeled with "slide x" where x corresponds to the slide number in the corresponding talk by Sean parent to moments where he compiles and runs the code. Through these commits you will see the transformations he applies. I have mostly faithfully copied his code examples, adding necessary #includes and using namespace lines to get it to compile.

Most of the time the only necessary compilation flag is C++11 support. When unique_ptrs are briefly used you may need C++14.

For example, on Mac OS X with Apple LLVM version 9.1.0 (clang-902.0.39.2) you can compile and run for any commit with

clang++ -std=c++14 client.cpp && ./a.out