Category: Software Development

How to approach big tasks

If you see a problem in your current project, don’t delay it – tackle it by going risk first.

In the heart of software development lies “the system”. The system is always complicated enough that you cannot fully grasp it and it is built by stacking parts on top of another that are just a tad too big to be called simple. The life of a software developer is an ongoing series of isolated projects that are at the threshold of his or her capabilities. We call these projects “epics”, “stories” or just “issues”. The sum of these projects is a system.

Don’t get me wrong – there a tons of issues that just require an hour, a cup of coffee and a few lines of code. This is the green zone of software development. You cannot possibly fail these issues. If you require twice the time, it’s still way before lunchtime. And even if you fail them, a colleague will have your back.
I’m talking about those issues that appear on your to-do list and behave like roadblocks. You dread them from far away and you know that this isn’t smooth sailing for an hour, this will be tough work for several days. This isn’t just an issue, it is an issue by itself for you. You are definitely unsure if you can make it.

Typical small project management

How do you approach such a project? It isn’t an issue anymore, as soon as you get emotionally involved, it becomes a project. Even if your emotion is just dread or fear, it is still involvement. Even if your management style is evasion, it is still project management. Sure, you can reassign a few of these icebergs, but they will always be there. You need to learn to navigate and to tackle them. Hitting an iceberg in the “frontal collision”-style isn’t a good idea.

On closer inspection, every project consists of numerous parts that you already know a solution for – typical one-hour issues – and just a few parts that you cannot estimate because you don’t know how to even start. Many developers in this situation take the route of least resistance and start with the known pieces. It’s obvious, it feels good (you are making good progress, after all!) and it defers failure into an uncertain future (aka next work week). Right now, the project is under control and on its way. We can report 80% finished because we’ve done all the known parts. How hard can the unknown parts be anyway? Until they strike hard and wreck your estimates with “unforeseen challenges” and “sudden hardships”. At least this is what you tell your manager.

Risk first!

My preferred way to approach those projects is to reveal the whole map, to estimate all parts before I delve into the details. I already know most of the easy parts, but what about the unknown and/or hard parts? I don’t know their solution so I cannot reliably estimate their size. So I sit down and try to extract the core problem that I don’t know how to solve yet. This is the thing that prohibits an estimate. This is the white area on my map. This is the “here be dragons” area. If I spend my resources doing all the work other than this, I will succeed until I stand on the border of this area and see the dragon. And I will not have sufficient resources left. My allies (like my manager and colleagues) will grow weary. I will have to fight my hardest battle in the most inconvenient setting.

My approach is to take the risk upfront. Tackle the core problem and fail. Get up and tackle it again. Fail once more. And again. If you succeed with your task, the war is won. Your project will still require work, but it’s the easy kind of work (“just work”). You can estimate the remaining tasks and even if you’ve overspent in your first battle, you reliably know how much more resources you will need.

Fail fast

And if you don’t succeed? Well, then you know it with the least damage done. Your project will enter crisis mode, but in a position when there is still time and resources left. This is the concept of “fail fast”. To be able to fail fast, you need choose the “risk first” approach of task selection. To tackle the risk first, you need to be able to quantify the “risk” of your upcoming work.

Assessing risk

There are whole books about risk assessment that are interesting and helpful, but as a starter, you only need to listen to your stomach. If your stomach tells you that you are unsure about a specific part of your project, put that part on the “risky” list. If you don’t have a reliable stomach, try to estimate the part’s size. Do the estimation game with your colleagues. Planning poker, for example, is a great tool to uncover uncertainty because the estimates will differ. Just remember: Risk isn’t correlated with size. Just because a part is big doesn’t mean it is risky, too. Your crucial part can maybe be developed in an hour or two, given an inspiration and a cup of coffee.

Failing late means you’re out of options. Failing fast means you’ve eliminated an option and moved on.

Bringing your Grails app from 2.4 to 3.3

Updating to a new framework version often needs a lot of work and investigation how to fix problems that may arise. Usually there are upgrade guides that take you most of the way and make upgrading only a grind.

This also true for Grails and our upgrade experience with it. Often there are parts where you have to invest extra work and creativity. The current upgrade of our application from 2.4.5 to 3.3.8 is no exception:

The grind

The major changes and upgrade notes are part of the documentation so I will only mention them briefly:

  • Switch to the gradle build system
  • Using YAML as main configuration
  • Migration from filters to interceptors
  • New testing framework (partly optional because you can still use the old mixin framework with a plugin)
  • Package name changes
  • Former core features are now available as plugins like gsps, datasource and GORM
  • Functional tests need to use Spock+Geb or you will face weird problems and need to do extra work (we had selenium tests using selenium-server before)
  • Integration tests work differently so work needs to be done to migrate them
  • Logging using Lockback
  • Entities often need a @Entity annotation
  • Move some files to new Locations

The tricky stuff

  • A service named CounterService conflicts with spring boot autowiring so we had to rename it
  • Our TagLib tests using JUnit4 were failing with obscure errors, porting them to Spock fixed them.
  • We have so many dependencies that running the application with gradle:bootRun fails with: Createprocess error=206; the filename or extension is too long Fortunately adding grails { pathingJar = true } to build.gradle fixes the issue
  • Environment variables for gradle:bootRun are swallowed if not prefixed with “grails.”. We are using environment variables to customize running the application on the dev machines.

 

The hard parts

The most painful part was two central plugins we are using not being available anymore: shiro and searchable.

Shiro

For shiro there are some initial ports that work well for our needs, so the challenge was mostly finding the most fitting one of the forks on github. We went with the fork of Alin Pandichi and forked it ourselves to upgrade some version definitions.

Searchable becomes ElasticSearch

The real odyssee began looking for a replacement of the abandoned searchable plugin. Fortunately there is the compelling ElasticSearch-plugin which uses almost the same API as the searchable plugin:

The plugin focus on exposing Grails domain classes for the moment. It highly takes the existing Searchable Plugin as reference for its syntax and behaviour.

Unfortunately, we were unable to get it to work with our project trying many different versions, so we decided to fork and fix it for us. The main problems were:

  • Essentially, it does not work properly with hibernate as a data store because it chokes on the JavaAssist proxies hibernate often creates for domain objects.
  • An easy to fix concurrency issue
  • Not flexible enough converters

After a lot of debugging and a couple of fixes and the new feature of being able to use a spring bean as a converter we had search working smoothly and better than ever.

Wrapping it all up

The upgrade of our application to the newest incarnation of Grails was a rocky ride and took us quite some time.

On the other hand the framework got a lot better. Especially gradle is much better to manage than the previous build system.

So we are looking forward to a much better and robust development experience in the future and hope for some less revolutionary releases and easier upgrades.

How to teach C++

In the closing Keynote of this year’s Meeting C++, Nicolai Josuttis remarked how hard it can be to teach C++ with its ever expanding complexity. His example was teaching rookies about initialization in C++, i.e. whether to use assignment =, parens () or curly braces {}. He also asked for more application-level programmers to participate.

Well, I am an application programmer, and I also have experience with teaching C++. Last year I held a C++ introductory course for experienced C programmers who mostly had never used C++ before. From my experience, I can completely agree with what Nico had to say about teaching C++. The language and its subtlety can be truly overwhelming.

Most of the complexity in C++ boils down to tuning your code for optimal performance. We cannot just leave that out, can we? After all, the sole reason to use C++ is performance, right?

My approach

Performance is one key reason for using C++, no doubt about it. There is a few more, but let us not get distracted. What is even more important is the potential to optimize for performance. But you can do that later! It is actually quite crazy what performance crimes you can get away with in C++ and still have something pretty fast overall, especially with move-semantics and improved RVO.

Given that, I picked a simple subset to start with:

  • Pass by-value only, do not use pointers nor references.
  • Structure your programs around simple data-only structs and functions transforming them.
  • Make good use of the data structures and algorithms from std.

Believe me, you too can write pretty useful programs this way. This is not too far from a data-oriented style anyways.
So, yes, we can actually leave out the performance specific parts for quite some time, while still making sure our programs can be optimized eventually.

And from there?

You can gradually start introducing references and move semantics, when measurement shows copying affecting the performance. This way you can introduce tooling like a profiler and see the effects off passing things around by reference in a language where everything, by default, is passed by value. These things will start to make sense in a context.

The arguably better approach to move semantics is of course types that prevent you from copying, but allow moving. Most resources with side-effects are like this: file handles, locks, threads. You will need to introduce RAII for this to make sense, e.g. writing ctors and dtors.

But you still do not need to write templates, use virtual-function polymorphism, or even pointers. But when you get to those, you will have a good context to use them.

Have you tought C++ and some experience to share? I would like to hear about it!

The sorry state of Grails (Plugins)

We have been developing and maintaining a complex web application on Grails since summer of 2008. By then Grails had passed the 1.0 release milestone and was really hot. A good 10 years later the application is still in use and we are trying to upgrade from Grails 2.4 to 3.3.

Upgrading Grails – a rough ride

Similar to past upgrade experiences the ride is not very smooth. Besides the major changes like the much welcomed switch to the gradle build system, interceptors instead of filters and streamlined configuration there are again a host of more subtle changes. The biggest problem for us though is the plugin situation.

It’s the plugins

In the past we had tough breaks like the abandoned selenium plugin in favor of the much better geb for functional testing. That had cost us a lot of work and many lost and not yet rewritten functional tests.

This time it seems especially hard because you two of our central plugins are not readily available anymore:

  1. Apache Shiro Plugin
  2. Compass-based Searchable Plugin

1. Shiro authentication

There still is no official release of the shiro plugin for Grails 3.x. After some searching and researching the initial port on github we decided to fork and maintain the most current forked version ourselves and try to work with it. Fortunately it was relatively easy to integrate and to update some dependencies. Our authentication and authorization works at least as good as before and we do not face additional problems. Working with interceptors feels quite good, too.

2. Search

The situation is harder with search. Compass and the searchable plugin are dead – plain and simple. The replacement for grails is the elasticsearch plugin which mostly adopted the API of the searchable plugin. Getting it to work is not that easy though. You have different versions depending on the grails 3 version you are targetting. Each plugin version targets a specific elasticsearch server version and so on. Often times (like in the default configuration) you will need a matching mapper-attachment plugin that is not available on maven in newer versions. This is mentioned somewhere in the midst of the plugin documentation.

Furthermore the plugin itself has some problems with hibernate proxies and concurrency so here we have to mess around with the plugin code once more. Once we have everything working for us like before we will try to get our patches upstream.

Marching forward

The upgrade from 2.x to 3.x is the biggest (and best) step of Grails into the right direction. On the downside it places a lot of burden on the application and plugin developers. That again increases the cost of maintaining proven applications further.

Right now we are close to a Grails 3.3 version of our application but have invested considerable effort into this upgrade.

Our current recommendation and practice is to not start new web applications based on the grails framework because there have been too many breaking changes and the maintainance cost is high. But we are keeping a close look at grails because the increased modularization and and new options like the grails-react-profile may keep grails interesting in the future.

Bending the Java syntax until it breaks

Did you ever bend a programming language until it breaks? This blog entry explores some rather unknown and silly regions of Java and connects them with upcoming language features.

Java is a peculiar programming language. It is used in lots of professional business cases and yet regarded as an easy language suitable for beginner studies. Java’s syntax in particular is criticized as bloated and overly strict and on the next blog praised as lenient and powerful. Well, lets have a look at a correct, runnable Java program that I like to show my students:

class $ {
	{
		System.out.println("hello world");
	}

	static {
		System.out.println("hello, too");
	}

	$() {
		http://www.softwareschneiderei.de
		while ($()) {
			break http;
		}
	}

	static boolean $() {
		return true;
	}

	public static void main(String[] _$) {
		System.out.println($.$());
	}
}

This Java code compiles, perhaps with some warnings about unlucky naming and can be run just fine. You might want to guess what its output to the console is. Notice that the code is quiet simple. No shenanigans with Java’s generics or the dark corners of lambda expressions and method handles. In fact, this code compiles and runs correctly since more than 20 years.

Lets dissect the code into its pieces. To really know what’s going on, you need to look into Java’s Language Specification, a magnificent compendium about everything that can be known about Java on the syntax level. If you want to dive even deeper, the Java Virtual Machine Specification might be your cup of tea. But be warned! Nobody on this planet understands everything in it completely. Even the much easier Java Language Specification contains chapters of pure magic, according to Joshua Bloch (you might want to watch the whole presentation, the statement in question is around the 6 minute mark). And in the code example above, we’ve used some of the magic, even if they are beginner level tricks.

What about the money?

The first glaring anomaly in the code is the strange names that are dollar signs or underscores. These are valid names, according to chapter 3.8 about Identifiers. And we’ve done great by choosing them. Let me quote the relevant sentence from this chapter:

“The “Java letters” include uppercase and lowercase ASCII Latin letters A-Z (\u0041-\u005a), and a-z (\u0061-\u007a), and, for historical reasons, the ASCII dollar sign ($, or \u0024) and underscore (_, or \u005f). The dollar sign should be used […]”

Oh, and by the way: Java identifiers are of unlimited length. You could go and write valid Java code that never terminates. We’ve gone the other way and made our names as short as possible – one character. Since identifiers are used as class names, method names, variable names and (implicitly) constructor names, we can name them all alike.

The variable name of the arguments in the main method used to be just an underscore, but somebody at Oracle changed this section of the Language Specification and added the following sentence:

“The underscore may be used in identifiers formed of two or more characters, but it cannot be used as a one-character identifier due to being a keyword.”

This change happened in Java 9. You can rename the variable “_$” to just “_” in Java 8 and it will work (with a warning).

URLs as first-class citizens?

The next thing that probably caught your eye is the URL in the first line of the constructor. It just stands there. And as I told you, the code compiles. This line is actually a combination of two things: A labeled statement and a comment. You already know about end-of-line comments that are started with a double slash. The rather unknown thing is the labeled statement before it, ending with a colon. This is one of the darker regions of the Language Specification, because it essentially introduces a poor man’s goto statement. And they knew it, because they explicitly talk about it:

“Unlike C and C++, the Java programming language has no goto statement; identifier statement labels are used with break…”

And this explains the weird line in the while loop: “break http” doesn’t command Java to do harm to the computer’s Internet connection, but to leave and complete the labeled statement, in our case the while loop. This spares us from the looming infinite loop, but raises another question: What names are allowed as labels? You’ve guessed it, it’s a Java identifier. We could have named our label “$:” instead of “http:” and chuckled about the line “break $”.

So, Java has a goto statement, but it isn’t called as such and it’s crippled to the point of being useless in practice. In my 20+ years of Java programming, I’ve seen it used just once in the wild.

What about it all?

This example of Java code serves me as a reminder that a programming language is what we make out of it. Our Java programs could easily all look like this if we wanted to. It’s not Java’s merit that our code is readable. And it’s not Java’s fault that we write bloated code. Both are results of our choices as programmers, not an inevitableness from the language we program in.

I sometimes venture to the darker regions of programming languages to see what the language could look and feel like if somebody makes the wrong decisions. This code example is from one of those little journeys several years ago. And it proved its worth once again when I tried to compile it with Java 9. Remember the addition in the Language Specification that made the single underscore a keyword? It wasn’t random. Java’s authors want to improve the lambda expressions in Project Amber, specifically in the JEP 302 (Lambda Leftovers). This JDK Enhancement Proposal (JEP) was planned for Java 10, is still not included in Java 11 and has no clear release date yet. My code gave me the motivation to dig into the topic and made me watch presentations like the one from Brian Goetz at Devoxx 2017 that’s really interesting and a bit unsettling.

Bending things until they break is one way to learn about their limits. What are your ways to learn about programming languages? Do you always stay in the middle lane? Leave a comment on your journeys.

3 rules for projects under version control

Checking out a project under version control should be easy and repeatable. Here are a few tips on how to achieve that:

1. Self-containment

You should not need a specifically configured machine to start working on a project. Ideally, you clone the project and get started. Many things can be a problem to achieve that.
Maybe your project is needs a specific operating system, dependency installed, hardware or database setup to run. I personally draw that line at this:
You get a manual with the code that helps you to set up your development environment once and this should be as automated & easy as possible. You should always be able to run your projects without periphery, i.e. specific hardware that can be plugged in or databases that need to be installed.
To achieve this for hardware, you can often fake it via polymorphic interfaces and dependency injection, much like mocking it for testing. The same can be done with databases – or you can use in-memory databases as a fallback.

2. Separate build-artifacts

Building the project into an executable form should be clearly separated from the source-controlled files. For example, the build should never ever modify a file that is under version control. Ideally, the “build” directory is completely independent from the source – enabling a true out-of-source build. However, it is often a good middle ground to allow building in a few dedicated directories in your source repository – but these need to be in .gitignore.

3. Separate runtime data

In the same way, running your project should not touch any source controlled files. Ideally, the project can be run out-of-source. This is trivial for small programs that do not have data, but once some data needs to be managed by the source control system, it gets a little more tricky for the executables to find the data. For data that needs to be changed by the program (we call these “stores”), it is advisable to maintain templates in the VCS or in codes, and copy them to the runtime directory during the build process. For data that is not changed by running the program, such as images, videos, translation-tables etc., you can copy them as well, or make sure the program finds them in the source repository.

Following these guidelines will make it easier to work with version control, especially when multiple people are involved.

Consistency over magic, please

The Groovy programming language is a JVM based scripting language. It is used by the Grails web framework and the Gradle build automation system.

Groovy has a language feature called Named argument constructors. This means that given a class with properties, for example

class Example {
  String text
}

you can initialize the properties directly when calling the constructor:

def example = new Example(text: ' This is an example. ')
assert example.text == ' This is an example. '

This is basically a shortcut for initializing the properties via explicit assignment:

def example = new Example()
example.text = ' This is an example. '
assert example.text == ' This is an example. '

So far so good.

Enter Grails

We use the aforementioned Grails framework for some of our web application projects. It is advertised on its website as featuring “convention-over-configuration” and “sensible defaults”. Grails uses the Groovy programming language, and a simple domain class looks just like a plain old Groovy class, except that it lives under the grails-app/domain directory (this is one of the convention-over-configuration aspects):

class Example {
  String text
}

As expected, you can initialize the property via regular assignment:

def example = new Example()
example.text = ' This is an example. '
assert example.text == ' This is an example. '

So one might expect that you can initialize it via a named argument constructor call as well:

def example = new Example(text: ' This is an example. ')
assert example.text == ' This is an example. '

And indeed, you can. But what’s this? Our assertion fails:

assert example.text == ' This is an example. '
               |    |
               |    false
               This is an example.

It is not directly obvious from the assertion failure output, but the property value is indeed no longer equal to the expected text: the leading and trailing spaces got trimmed!

I was surprised, but after some research in Grails documentation it turned out that it’s not a bug, but a feature. In the section on Data Binding, you can find the following sentence:

The mass property binding mechanism will by default automatically trim all Strings at binding time. To disable this behavior set the grails.databinding.trimStrings property to false in grails-app/conf/application.groovy.

Groovy’s named argument constructor feature is used as a data binding mechanism by Grails to bind web request parameters to a domain object. For this the default behavior was modified, so that strings are automatically trimmed. I can only guess that this is considered to be an instance of the “sensible defaults” mentioned on the Grails homepage.

To me personally this kind of surprising behavior is not a sensible default, and I think it goes against the Principle of least astonishement. I prefer consistency over “magic”.

The lorem ipsum in development

We’ve all been guilty of this: showing a new UI mockup to the user with lorem ipsum or typing in fake data into forms for testing.

We’ve all been guilty of this: showing a new UI mockup to the user with lorem ipsum or typing in fake data into forms for testing. That’s bad because fake data does not have the same characteristics of real data. Real data has specific lengths, formats and structure. Fake data is arbitrary. It is even more embarrassing if a lorem ipsum gets into production. But using fake data is not only a problem in the user interface.
Using fake data is also a problem in programming. We see it in names of classes: *Impl, *Manager or *Holder.
These names do not communicate well. Why not name classes with intent? Take a look at domain driven design and the ubiquitous language for a starter.
But also using only fake data in tests is bad. Yes you need to test the extreme cases but even here you need to inform your selection of data from the real world. Build in the constraints that the domain provides. Without the domain you build highly flexible software which is a nightmare to maintain. But also the test data should not be just arbitrary: you need the corner cases and to find them look again into the domain, the real world. To do this you need to gather real data from users, domain experts or existing systems and reports. Real data has constraints, constraints drive creativity and decisions. The problem with deferring the decisions too much is you maintain your flexibility until then. So make decisions but not from fake but real data.

Developer Experience means nothing

Always choose User Experience over Developer Experience.

You’ve probably already heard about the concept of User Experience (UX) and the matching virtue of User Experience Design. If not, you might want to go check it out. I would suggest you start with the excellent book “The Design of Everyday Things” from Donald Norman. It has nothing to do with software development, so you won’t mix up User Experience Design with Graphical User Interface Design or even Graphics Design.

In short, User Experience is what an user of your software will experience while using your software. If your software makes them smile, you’re some kind of UX god. If your software makes them curse repeatedly, you’re probably not. You can try to improve the experiences of your users by making changes to the software. This is called User Experience Design and is an important part of software development. Most developers know nothing about User Experience Design.

What developers naturally know about is Developer Experience (DX), a concept that isn’t really defined in the literature. I made it up to explain my point to you. Every software developer has a favorite programming language and IDE. Remember, the source codes of the same problem in different programming languages will ultimately yield the same machine code. The machine is totally agnostic about your preferences for a certain programming language. Your choice of a programming language for a certain problem is more about your Developer Experience than anything else. Developer Experience is everything you feel and think during software development. A bad Developer Experience lets you swear about the tools, the code and everything and everybody else around you. A good Developer Experience gives you a sense of accomplishment and safety while coding and makes your work not harder than necessary.

Because you can’t read elsewhere about the concept of Developer Experience, I want to give two more examples and show how it affects the User Experience. The first example is a big, long-lasting software system that is in production and still developed further. If you have a software system in production, everything requires an additional thought about the matching upgrade strategy. You can’t just modify the database structure, you need to provide migrations. You can’t just add a configuration entry, you need to make it optional or consider the least harmful default value. In the project of our example, the developers had three possible approaches to a new configuration entry:

  • They could add it to the code but leave the configuration files unchanged. This required the code to handle the “absent from configuration” case in a useful manner. It required the developer to make effort in the code. The user would not know about the new configuration entry if not stated in some external documentation.
  • They could add it to the code and write a configuration migration script that added it to the existing configuration files on the customer’s installation. The code could now expect the entry to be present, but the developer had to write and test the migration script code. The user would see the new configuration entry with the default value.
  • They could introduce a new configuration file to the system and place the new configuration entry in it. The code could expect the entry to be present, because new configuration files were added to an existing installation during the upgrade process. The user would see the new configuration file and the new configuration entry with the default value.

You can probably guess which of the three options got used so excessively that users complained about the configuration being all over the place, in a myriad of little one-liner configuration files with ominous names. The developers chose the best option for them and, in short view, for the users. But on the long run, the User Experience declined.

The second example is from a computer game in the mid 2000s. It was a massive multiplayer online shooter with a decent implementation ahead of its time. But one thing was still from the last century: After each update of the game, the key bindings were reset to the default. And every other aspect of local modification to the settings, too. After each update, you had to configure your video, audio, controls and everything else like your in-game equipment again and again. The game didn’t offer any means to copy or reload your settings. It was up to you to maintain a recent backup of the settings files just in case. And if the file format was changed, you needed to combine their changes with yours. WinMerge is a decent tool for that task. But the problem is clear: The game developers couldn’t be bothered to think about how their upgrade strategy would affect their users. They ignored the problem and let the users figure it out. They chose better Developer Experience, free from complexities like user-side modifications over good User Experience like a game that can be upgraded without drawbacks for the gamers.

Sadly, this is an usual formula in software development: Developer Experience is more important than User Experience. Just look at it from an utilitarian point of view: If you burden thousands or even millions of users with just an easy one-minute task that you could fix during development, you have a budget of two workdays up to 10 person-years. Do the math yourself: One million users, each spending one minute of work on your software, equal to over 2000 workdays lost on a thing you could probably fix for everybody in an hour or two.

And this brings me to my central statement: Developer Experience, as opposed to User Experience, means nothing. It’s just not important. At least for all the users. It is important to the small group of developers and should not be forgotten. But never should a decision lead to better Developer Experience on the expense of User Experience. It’s a small inconvenience for us developers to think about smooth upgrades, meaningful and consistent control element titles or an easy installation. It’s a whole new game for our users.

Always choose User Experience over Developer Experience.

Call to action: If you have another good example of developers being lazy on the expense of their users, please share it as a comment.

Call to action 2: The initial picture is linked from the excellent website badhtml.com. If you ever feel like an imposter for your latest design, go and visit this website.

luabind deboostified tips and tricks

luabind deboostified is a fork of the luabind project that helps exposing APIs to Lua. As the name implies, it replaces the boost dependency with modern C++, which makes it a lot more pleasant to work with.

Here are a few tips and tricks I learned while working with it. Some tricks might be applicable to the original luabind – I do not know.

1. Splitting module registration

You can split the registration code for different classes. I usually add a register function per class, like this:

struct A {
  void doSomething();
  static luabind::scope registerWithLua();
};

struct B {
  void goodStuff();
  static luabind::scope registerWithLua();
};

You can then combine their registration code into a single module on the Lua side: 

void registerAll(lua_State* L) {
  luabind::module(L)[
    A::registerWithLua(),
    B::registerWithLua()];
}

The implementation of a registration function looks like this:

luabind::scope A::registerWithLua()
{
  return luabind::class_<A>("A")
    .def("doSomething", &A::doSomething);
}

2. Multiple policies and multiple return values

Unlike C++, Lua has real multiple return values. You can use that by utilizing the return value policies that luabind offers. Lets say, you want to write this in Lua:

local x, y = a.getPosition()

The C++ side could look like this:

void getPosition(A const& a, float& x, float& y);

The deboostified fork needs its policies supplied in a type list. Let’s use a small helper meta-function to build that:

template <typename... T>
using joined = 
  typename luabind::meta::join<T...>::type;

Once you have that, you can expose it like this: 

luabind::def("getPosition", &getPosition,
              joined<
                luabind::pure_out_value<2>,
                luabind::pure_out_value<3>
              >());

3. Specialized data structures using luabind::object

Using the converters in luabind is not the only way to make Lua values from C++. Almost everything you can do in Lua itself, you can do with luabind::object. Here is a somewhat contrived example:

luabind::object repeat(luabind::object what,
                       int count) {
  // Create a new table object
  auto result = luabind::newtable(
    what.interpreter());
  // Fill it as an array [1..N]
  for (int i = 1; i <= count; ++i)
    result[i] = what;
  return result;
}

This function can then be exported via luabind::def and used just like any other function. This is just the tip of the iceberg, though. For example, you can also write functions that, at runtime, behave differently when a number is passed in as when a table is passed in. You can find out the Lua type with luabind::type(myObject).

Of course, as soon as you want to create new objects to return to Lua, you need the lua_State pointer in that function. Using the interpreter from a passed-in luabind::object is one way, but I have yet to find another pleasant way to do this. It is probably possible to use the policies to do this, and have them pass that in as a special parameter, but for now I am using some complicated machinery to bind lambda functions that capture the Lua interpreter.

That’s it for now..

Keep in mind that these are not thoroughly researched best-practices, but patterns I have used to solve actual problems. There might be better solutions out there – if you know any, please let me know. Hope this helped!