What is this blog ?

This blogs aims to enlighten the reader about bad yet often seen pratices in C++, explainations on how it is bad and ways to avoid it.

You will occasionally see artcles about good pratices instead of bad ones, and sometimes strange-yet-interesting behavior.

Feel free to give opinion, advice, or precisions on these articles.

The team

The crew of Belay the C++ is composed of two people:

• Chloé Lourseyre, creator of the blog and main author.
• Peter Fordham, copy editor.

More details about them on the following page : Team.

Latest articles

• a = b = c, a strange consequence of operator associativity
• How to quantify technical debt inflation
• Who owns the memory?
• 3 interesting behaviors of C++ casts
• Constant references are not always your friends
• I don’t know which container to use (and at this point I’m too afraid to ask)
• Retrospective: The simplest error handler
• One of the simplest error handlers ever written
• The three types of development
• Prettier switch-cases
• Is my cat Turing-complete?
• Duff’s device in 2021
• Pragma: once or twice?
• [History of C++] The genesis of casting.
• [History of C++] Templates: from C-style macros to concepts
• [History of C++] Explanation on why the keyword `class` has no more reason to exist
• Yet another reason to not use printf (or write C code in general)
• Best ways to convert an enum to a string
• About sizes
• How to choose between a setter and a reference-getter?
• You shouldn’t assume accessors are fast
• How many languages should a (C++) expert speak?
• Should every variable be const by default?
• Don’t use raw loops
• Exceptions are just fancy gotos
• Dealing with integer overflows
• A list of bad practices commonly seen in industrial projects
• Lambdas as const ref
• Yet another pamphlet about inlining
• windows.h breaks the standard library (and my will to live)
• Passing an enum by parameter
• About &= and |=