Book Image

Advanced C++

By : Gazihan Alankus, Olena Lizina, Rakesh Mane, Vivek Nagarajan, Brian Price
5 (1)
Book Image

Advanced C++

5 (1)
By: Gazihan Alankus, Olena Lizina, Rakesh Mane, Vivek Nagarajan, Brian Price

Overview of this book

C++ is one of the most widely used programming languages and is applied in a variety of domains, right from gaming to graphical user interface (GUI) programming and even operating systems. If you're looking to expand your career opportunities, mastering the advanced features of C++ is key. The book begins with advanced C++ concepts by helping you decipher the sophisticated C++ type system and understand how various stages of compilation convert source code to object code. You'll then learn how to recognize the tools that need to be used in order to control the flow of execution, capture data, and pass data around. By creating small models, you'll even discover how to use advanced lambdas and captures and express common API design patterns in C++. As you cover later chapters, you'll explore ways to optimize your code by learning about memory alignment, cache access, and the time a program takes to run. The concluding chapter will help you to maximize performance by understanding modern CPU branch prediction and how to make your code cache-friendly. By the end of this book, you'll have developed programming skills that will set you apart from other C++ programmers.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
7
6. Streams and I/O

Visibility, Lifetime, and Access

We have talked about creating our own types and declaring variables and functions while mainly focusing on simple functions and a single file. We will now look at what happens when there are multiple source files (translation units) that contain classes and function definitions. Also, we'll check which variables and functions can be visible from the other parts of the source files, how long the variables live, and look at the difference between internal and external linkage. In Chapter 1, Anatomy of Portable C++ Software, we saw how the toolchain works to compile the source files and produce the object files and that the the linker puts it all together to form an executable program.

When a compiler processes a source file, it generates an object file that contains the translated C++ code and enough information for the linker to resolve any references from the compiled source file to another source file. In Chapter 1, Anatomy of Portable C++ Software,...