Designing, writing and maintaining systems targeting multiple platforms is hard! The same system might simultaneously target desktops, browsers, cloud services and multiple different mobile devices. Each target with it's own requirements, tool-chains, APIs, SDKs and limitations. Mixing platform specific code with core functionality often leads to spaghetti code resulting in a refactoring and maintenance nightmare that is non-portable, un-testable with ample nooks and crannies for bugs to hide in.

In this talk I'll present a system architecture that I call The Salami Method. The Salami Method finely distinguishes between the different aspects and layers required for exposing platform-independent C++ on different “specific” platforms. At its extreme it strives to create a single, thin, transparent layer for each such aspect so that each layer is more easily built, tested, debugged, managed and maintained.

I will introduce the Salami Method and show a practical example of using it build a single C++ OpenCV app targeting both the desktop and the web with the same codebase.