The Roles of Symmetry And Orthogonality In Design Charley Bay Cpp Con 2021

An essential aspect in designing C and C++ systems is to validate the execution flow and resource contention of a proposed approach in the contexts of symmetry and orthogonality. The role of symmetry is to provide some level of notional understanding without requiring direct inspection (using similarity to enable greater scaling and management of design complexity). The role of orthogonality is to remove edge cases and coupling by making things unrelated (thereby making whole system scaling to be simpler, more efficient, and more adaptable). These roles establish symmetry and orthogonality as useful tools to define our systems by leveraging different aspects of knowing many things about our system components and their possible interactions intuitively, and without tedious scrutiny. Symmetry allows us to know things we should not otherwise know; while orthogonality grants simplicity to dismiss as a possibility some behavi