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Structuring C++ code (Visual Studio)

Jesper Nielsen · 2018-04-18T08:37:03

I'm getting back into C++ after not playing with it for many years. Being spoiled as a C# programmer I'm finding quite a few things about the Visual Studio environment surprisingly puzzling. I'm used to just being able to add a class to a folder, and I want to structure my code in folders with matching namespace, but whenever I try to add a class to a folder Visual Studio just puts it in the root. I can of course move it but I can't help thinking - if VS is making it so hard for me to do what I want am I doing something wrong? How do you structure your C++ code?

General and Gameplay Programming Programming C++ Advice

Started by Polydone April 12, 2018 06:16 PM

10 comments, last by matt77hias 6 years, 2 months ago

matt77hias

560

April 18, 2018 08:37 AM

1 hour ago, Shaarigan said:

Going one step further, do never split header (.h) and implementation (.cpp) files because it is pure bad design to do so especially but not limited to greater projects! I always feel wasting my time to seek for the coresponding .h or .cpp files when investigating projects on GitHub.

I totally agree with this. If you want to develop a codebase (which both version control software such as Git and repository hosting systems such as Github support and facilitate), header files, template implementation files and implementation files should be put in the same directory for ease of use during development.

If you want to distribute your API, you only provide an Include directory containing the header files and template implementation files, and a binary .lib. And of course, you could add a script to your codebase to automate this stripping and building.

Unfortunately, many C++ Github repositories aim at distribution and integration into external projects instead of development of the internal projects themselves.