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by MrMcCall 443 days ago
All his ideas are fantastic, and are obviously the result of long experience in a seasoned and highly successful project. He is sharing techniques that simply work for large, complex codebases. Ignore them at your peril!

Specifically, though, these sections are related, in my experience:

> Avoid "bad" functions

> Buffer functions

> Parsing functions

> Monitor memory function use

These related aspects are why I tend to wrap many library functions that I use (in any language environment) with my own wrapper function, even if it's to just localize their use into one single entry/use point. That allows me to have one way that I use the function, thereby giving my code a place to not only place all best practices for its use, but to allow me to update those best practices in one single place for the entire codebase. And it is especially helpful if I want to simply rewrite the code itself to, for example, never use scanf, which I determined was a necessary strategy many, many moons ago.

Now, when a single function needs to accomodate different use cases and doing such separate kinds of logic would incur too much logical or runtime cost, a separate wrapper can be added, but if the additional wrappers can utilize the cornerstone wrapper, that is the best, if feasible. Of course, all these wrappers should be located in the same chunk of code.

For C, especially, wrapper functions also allow me to have my own naming convention over top of the standard library's terse names (without using macros, because they're to be avoided). That makes it easier for me to remember its name, thereby further reducing cognitive load.