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

As for how much work should be done in the constructor, I'd say it should take into account how slow things are, how you are going to use the class, and generally how you feel about it personally.

On your directory structure object: I recently implemented a samba (windows shares) browser for my HTPC, and as that was incredibly slow I opted to only actually initialize a directory when it was touched. e.g. First the tree would consist of just a list of machines, then whenever you browse into a directory the system would automatically initialize the tree from that machine and get the directory listing one level deeper, and so on.

Ideally I think you could even take it as far as writing a worker thread that scans the directories breadth-first, and would give priority to the directory you're currently browsing, but generally that's just too much work for something simple ;)