C++ Project Organization
How to make large-scale coding easy and fun
For the past week I've been writing a program to integrate all my old demos and 3D projects under source into a single framework. The first step of the process was putting all these projects under source control. Once I had a way to track and rollback changes it was time to clean up my projects.
This article focuses on project structure—the directory hierarchy, make files, etc. I'll assume you already know the benefits of organizing your code into separate headers & source [1].
There's a couple of issues we need to find solutions for:
- Directory Pollution: the project should be simple to navigate. The convention that each directory contains only highly-related files works well. In other words, the directory tree should be a well-formed taxonomy.
- Revision Control: the project should play well with revision control.
- Code Pollution: this is more a matter of style, but classes shouldn't be hidden behind files. Files should map very clearly onto the classes they contain. They should contain as few classes as possible, 3 at the most.
Issues Specific to C++
C++ has the "distinction" of supporting separate source and header files. While this has the often-cited benefits of speedy compilation and easier integration with foreign function interface generators.