This session is part of the Software Design Track.
An essential aspect in designing C and C++ systems is to validate the execution flow and resource contention of a proposed approach in the contexts of symmetry and orthogonality.
The role of symmetry is to provide some level of notional understanding without requiring direct inspection (using “similarity” to enable greater scaling and management of design complexity). The role of orthogonality is to remove edge cases and coupling by making things unrelated (thereby making whole system scaling to be simpler, more efficient, and more adaptable).
These roles establish symmetry and orthogonality as useful tools to define our systems by leveraging different aspects of “knowing” many things about our system components and their possible interactions intuitively, and without tedious scrutiny. Symmetry allows us to “know” things we should not otherwise know; while orthogonality grants simplicity to dismiss as a possibility some behaviors or component interactions within the resulting system.
In practice, we use C and C++ language guarantees to implement design choices. But, these design choices come from integrating: (1) the problem to be addressed; and (2) exploiting symmetry and orthogonality to fabricate a system that is logical, implementable, scalable, and unsurprising.
ALL TALK SESSIONS CAN BE ACCESSED FROM THE MAIN LOBBY:
https://cppcon.digital-medium.co.uk/
