Namespaces hell

Welcome in namespace hell. In this place you will find annoying code and the best part: it is on demand. So lets start another topic base on one of my horror stories which ended with hours spend to straight things up.

But let's start from begin. This words probably don't mean a lot for you: s2d, s3d, world2d. world3d, fs, sound, physics, math, navmesh, utility, resources, game, editor, lba, wre, wr.

Personally I know them really well. All of this are namespaces that I used or using in my code. This is collection from 7 years of development and they are probably not all of them. When I start writing engine I wanted to do stuff right. So I created modules which then I encapsulate in namespaces. This was naive and stupid because I ended with annoying code. Who want to write physics::CPhysics for physics class? This is duplicated information. But well with time I got smarter and removed most of them using simple method : Find and replace all.

This was my first sin. After this operation I left with code where you could find stuff like this:

namesace wre
{
    class A : public wre::class B
    {
        ...
    }
}

The second sin is my mistake of using prefixes for basics types and functions which were outside of namespace. So I had wrVec3, wrQuat, wrMtx44 and functions with similar convention. Why I call it sin ? Because I ended with inconsistent code standard which is not something good and create really a lot of issue. For what you use prefix for what namespace?

So right now I'm decided to clean all of my past mistakes. There will be only one simple convention. Everything will be in one main namespace wr (stands for White Rabbit) and helpers wr::math. I will cleanup naming convention, remove prefixes and put everything related to engine in this namespace.

If somebody think that namespace is useless in he can always use : 


using namespace wr; 


to remove need of using it explicit. I think that this change will only result in simpler and easier to understand code. But well there are no sure things.

What do you think about namespaces ? You would recommend them or rather burn them using fire ?

Greg

Comments

  1. "When I start writing engine I wanted to do stuff right."

    This is what I tell myself *each* *time* I throw away an engine and start a new one :-)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hehe :] this is problem of a lot people. But well probably right now you working on something awesome in home :P and me I'm still working on the same old tech.

      Delete

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