How much work should be done in a constructor?

Question

Should operations that could take some time be performed in a constructor or should the object be constructed and then initialised later.

For example when constructi

Answer 1

It depends (typical CS answer). If you are constructing objects at startup for a long-running program, then there is no problem with doing a lot of work in constructors. If this is part of a GUI where fast response is expected, it might not be appropriate. As always, the best answer is to try it the simplest way first, profile, and optimize from there.

For this specific case, you can do lazy construction of the sub-directory objects. Only create entries for the names of the top level directories. If they are accessed, then load the contents of that directory. Do this again as the user expolres the directory structure.