As a Java engineer in the web development industry for several years now, having heard multiple times that X is good because of SOLID principles or Y is bad because it breaks SOLID principles, and having to memorize the “good” ways to do everything before an interview etc, I find it harder and harder to do when I really start to dive into the real reason I’m doing something in a particular way.
One example is creating an interface for every goddamn class I make because of “loose coupling” when in reality none of these classes are ever going to have an alternative implementation.
Also the more I get into languages like Rust, the more these doubts are increasing and leading me to believe that most of it is just dogma that has gone far beyond its initial motivations and goals and is now just a mindless OOP circlejerk.
There are definitely occasions when these principles do make sense, especially in an OOP environment, and they can also make some design patterns really satisfying and easy.
What are your opinions on this?
Very often you need to choose a type based on the data it needs to hold. If you know you’ll need to store numbers of a certain size, use an integer type that can actually hold it, don’t make it dependent on a platform definition. Always using
intcan lead to really insidious bugs where a function may work on one platform and not on another due to overfloeShow me one.
I mean I have worked on 16bits platforms, but nobody would use that code straight out of the box on some other incompatible platform, it doesn’t even make sense.
Basically anything low level. When you need a byte, you also don’t use a
int, you use auint8_t(reminder thatcharis actually not defined to be signed or unsigned, “Plain char may be signed or unsigned; this depends on the compiler, the machine in use, and its operating system”). Any time you need to interact with another system, like hardware or networking, it is incredibly important to know how many bits the other side uses to avoid mismatching.For purely the size of an
int, the most famous example is the Ariane 5 Spaceship Launch, there an integer overflow crashed the space ship. OWASP (the Open Worldwide Application Security Project) lists integer overflows as a security concern, though not ranked very highly, since it only causes problems when combined with buffer accesses (using user input with some arithmetic operation that may overflow into unexpected ranges).And the byte wasn’t obliged to have 8 bits.
Nice example, but I’d say it’skind of niche 😁 makes me remember the underflow in a video game, making the most peaceful npc becoming a warmongering lunatic. But that would not have been helped because of defines.