Assumptions aren't that bad in source code if ...

17 Feb 2022

Design-by-Contract is not only an easy way to find bugs earlier, it is also a great tactic to improve your code quality. With Design-by-Contract we can document expectations and assumptions crystal clear in the source code itself and so improve changeability and maintainability!

How this works I explain in this video:

Design-by-Contract for C

Once upon a time a long time ago …

… I worked in a project in the context of embedded systems. The project was developed in C programming language and I wanted to use Design-by-Contract there as well. I found a project developed in Ruby which was designed a pre-processor for C. It used tags embedded in C API comments to generate runtime checks as well as Doxygen based documentation.

The pre-processor worked pretty well for my project and I even contributed to it.

I couldn’t figure out what happened to the source code since RubyForge was shut down but here you can still download the ruby gems:

https://rubygems.org/gems/dbc/versions/2.0.0
https://www.openhub.net/p/dbc

The "CleanCode" series