Book Image

Modern C++: Efficient and Scalable Application Development

By : Richard Grimes, Marius Bancila
Book Image

Modern C++: Efficient and Scalable Application Development

By: Richard Grimes, Marius Bancila

Overview of this book

C++ is one of the most widely used programming languages. It is fast, flexible, and used to solve many programming problems. This Learning Path gives you an in-depth and hands-on experience of working with C++, using the latest recipes and understanding most recent developments. You will explore C++ programming constructs by learning about language structures, functions, and classes, which will help you identify the execution flow through code. You will also understand the importance of the C++ standard library as well as memory allocation for writing better and faster programs. Modern C++: Efficient and Scalable Application Development deals with the challenges faced with advanced C++ programming. You will work through advanced topics such as multithreading, networking, concurrency, lambda expressions, and many more recipes. By the end of this Learning Path, you will have all the skills to become a master C++ programmer. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: • Beginning C++ Programming by Richard Grimes • Modern C++ Programming Cookbook by Marius Bancila • The Modern C++ Challenge by Marius Bancila
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
12
Math Problems
13
Language Features
14
Strings and Regular Expressions
15
Streams and Filesystems
16
Date and Time
17
Algorithms and Data Structures
Index

Allocating memory in code


C++ defines two operators, new and delete, that allocate memory from the free store and release memory back into the free store.

Allocating individual objects

The new operator is used with the type to allocate memory, and it will return a typed pointer to that memory:

    int *p = new int; // allocate memory for one int

The new operator will call the default constructor for custom types for every object it creates (as explained in Chapter 4, Classes). Built-in types do not have constructors, so instead a type initialization will occur and this will usually initialize the object to zero (in this example, a zero integer).

In general, you should not use memory allocated for built-in types without explicitly initializing it. In fact, in Visual C++ the debug version of the new operator will initialize memory to a value of 0xcd for every byte, as a visual reminder in the debugger that you have not initialized the memory. For custom types, it is left to the author of the type...