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

Variadic Templates

In Chapter 2B, No Ducks Allowed - Templates and Deduction, we introduced generic programming and templates. Templates have been part of C++ before C++03. Prior to C++11, templates were limited to a fixed number of arguments. In some cases, where a variable number of arguments was required, it was necessary to write a template for each variant of argument numbers required. Alternatively, there were variadic functions like printf() that could take a variable number of arguments. The problem with variadic functions is that they are not type safe as access to the arguments was through type casts via the va_arg macro. C++11 changed all that with the introduction of variadic templates where a single template can take an arbitrary number of arguments. C++17 improved the writing of variadic templates by introducing the constexpr if construct that would allow the base case template to be merged with the "recursive" template.

The best approach is to implement a variadic...