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

Class Templates

We have only dealt with function templates so far. But templates can also be used to provide blueprints for classes. The general structure of a templated class declaration is as follows:

template<class T>

class MyClass {

   // variables and methods that use T.

};

Whereas template functions allow us to produce generic algorithms, template classes allow us to produce generic data types and their associated behaviors.

When we introduced the Standard Template Library, we highlighted that it includes templates for containers – vector, deque, stack, and so on. These templates allow us to store and manage any data type that we want, but still behave as we would expect.

Exercise 4: Writing a Class Template

Two of the most commonly used data structures in computing science are stack and queue. Both currently have implementations in the STL. But to get our feet wet with a templated class, we are going to write a stack template class that can be used for any type...