patterns

Design Patterns and Architectural Patterns with C++: A First Overview

Based on my last poll, “Which mentoring program should I implement next?” I recognized that there is a significant demand for writing about “Design Patterns and Architectural Patterns with C++”. Today, I would like to present to you my plan for future posts.

 

patterns

Although I call this introduction post “Design Patterns and Architectural Patterns with C++”, the focus of this article series is way broader. I also write about basic terminology, idioms, and concurrency patterns. The image serves two purposes.

  • It gives you the first idea of my plan. This means you know what you can expect.
  • You may miss one of your topics in my overview. Consequentially, write me an e-mail or, even better, write a guest post.

I refine my plan as I go. Here is my first refinement.

Terminology

Design Pattern

The term design patterns go back to Christoph Alexander, who wrote about architecture and urban planning: “Each pattern is a three part rule, which expresses a relation between a certain context, a problem, and a solution.” The classic “Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software” by Eric Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides (short GOF) coined this term for software development.

Roughly said, there are three types of patterns: architectural patterns, design patterns, and idioms.

Types of Patterns

Architectural patterns describe the fundamental structure of a software system and are often based on design patterns. An idiom is an implementation of an architecture or design pattern in a concrete programming language. This classification of patterns goes back to the second classic that is also a must-read: Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture: A System of Patterns” Frank Buschmann, Regine Meunier, Hans Rohnert, Peter Sommerlad, and Michael Stal (short POSA).

Anti-Patterns

We have Patterns and Anti-Patterns. Anti-Patterns are a proven way to shoot yourself into the foot.

 

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    These are only the main parts of the terminology I will write about. I also will write about additional aspects of patterns, such as their advantages and disadvantages, history, and structure.

    Design Patterns

    I make it short. The seminal book “Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software” has 23 patterns. They are classified in two ways:

    • Creational, structural, and behavioral
    • Class patterns and object patterns

    The classification of class patterns and object patterns is essentially a classification in inheritance versus composition as a means to build abstractions out of existing abstractions. Not all of the 23 patterns are highly relevant today. Therefore, I will give a concise overview and code examples in modern C++ about the following patterns written in bold letters:

    15DesignPattern

    Okay, both classics GOF (1994) and POSA (1996) are a bit dated. What does this mean for modern C++? This is precisely the question I tackle in the next series of posts.

    Idioms

    An idiom is an implementation of an architecture or design pattern in a concrete programming language. We have many idioms in C++ such as

    • Copy-and-swap
    • The rule of zero, fix, or six
    • Hidden friends
    • Resource acquisition is initialization (RAII)
    • Dynamic polymorphism and static polymorphism
    • Templates (curiously recurring template pattern (CRTP), expression templates, policy and traits, tag dispatching, type erasure, … )

    This is probably the part of my tour through patterns where I could benefit the most from your comments. Which other idioms do you know in C++?

    Architectural Patterns

    Architectural patterns describe the fundamental structure of a software system and are often based on design patterns. I will present at least the following ones.

    • Pipes-and-Filters: Decomposes a complex task into a series of elementary tasks that can be composed
    • Layers: Split the software system into layers, where each layer has a certain responsibility and provides a service to a higher layer.
    • Model View Controller (MVC): Decompose a (user) interface into the three components model, view, and controller
      • Model: the core of the application that registers views and controls; updates the view and the controller
      • View: Presents the information to the user; get the data from the model
      • Controller: Interacts with the user and updates the data
    • Reactor: An event-driven application that can accept multiple client requests simultaneously and distribute them to different service providers.

    Concurrency Patterns

    A necessary requirement for a data race is a shared mutable state. Consequentially, the synchronization patterns deal with both issues. Here are the synchronization patterns I want to write about:

    • Sharing
      • Copied value: Copied data cannot be a victim of a data race.
      • Thread-specific storage: Enables global state within a thread.
      • Futures: Non-modifiable placeholder for a value set by a promise.
    • Mutation
      • Scoped locking: RAII applied to locking.
      • Strategized locking: Use different locking strategies.
      • Thread-safe interface: Extends the critical section to an object.
      • Guarded suspension: Combine a lock to be acquired and a precondition to be satisfied before an operation can be executed.

    Furthermore, we have to think about concurrent architecture. 

    • Active object: Separates the method execution from the method call.
    • Monitor object: Synchronizes access to an object so that only one member function can be executed at any moment in time.

    What’s next?

    In my next post, I start my journey through the “Design Patterns and Architectural Patterns with C++”. First, I will write about design patterns’ origins and history.

     

     

     

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    Thanks, in particular, to Jon Hess, Lakshman, Christian Wittenhorst, Sherhy Pyton, Dendi Suhubdy, Sudhakar Belagurusamy, Richard Sargeant, Rusty Fleming, John Nebel, Mipko, Alicja Kaminska, Slavko Radman, and David Poole.

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