recall

← recall

deep module concept

Ousterhout's central design idea: the best modules hide a lot of complexity behind a small interface.

Ousterhout's central design idea: the best modules hide a lot of complexity behind a small interface. A file system is deep — open/read/write/close hides crash recovery, caching, concurrency, on-disk format. A pass-through wrapper is shallow — it adds an interface without hiding any complexity. Most decomposition mistakes come from creating shallow modules that fragment implementation without abstracting it.

see also

topics: engineering-judgment, architecture

references: