Know your design tools — The Performing Half-baked object case
Among other important paradigms in software design, object orientation is a common set of design techniques these days. Hierarchies of classes, derivative class instantiations and virtual calls can be often found on software codebases. Hence, the relevance of the Performing Half-baked object case while designing object-oriented software.
The Performing Half-baked object case occurs where a virtual call is executed onto an unborn or uncreated or uninitialized class instance: the actual behavior can be unexpected, of course.
A couple of examples (code as text here).
Consider the output of this Windows/Visual C++ code:
For another –different– behavior, consider the output of this .NET/Visual C# code:
The Performing Half-baked object is a case that designers of object-oriented languages and runtimes have typically faced. Any designer using those languages and runtimes should be aware of this and other cases during the process of object creation.
