Book Image

C++17 STL Cookbook

By : Jacek Galowicz
Book Image

C++17 STL Cookbook

By: Jacek Galowicz

Overview of this book

C++ has come a long way and is in use in every area of the industry. Fast, efficient, and flexible, it is used to solve many problems. The upcoming version of C++ will see programmers change the way they code. If you want to grasp the practical usefulness of the C++17 STL in order to write smarter, fully portable code, then this book is for you. Beginning with new language features, this book will help you understand the language’s mechanics and library features, and offers insight into how they work. Unlike other books, ours takes an implementation-specific, problem-solution approach that will help you quickly overcome hurdles. You will learn the core STL concepts, such as containers, algorithms, utility classes, lambda expressions, iterators, and more, while working on practical real-world recipes. These recipes will help you get the most from the STL and show you how to program in a better way. By the end of the book, you will be up to date with the latest C++17 features and save time and effort while solving tasks elegantly using the STL.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Accessing std::vector instances the fast or the safe way


The std::vector is probably the most widely used container in the STL, because it holds data just like an array, and adds a lot of comfort around that representation. However, wrong access to a vector can still be dangerous. If a vector contains 100 elements, and by accident our code tries to access an element at index 123, this is obviously bad. Such a program could just crash, which might be the best case, because that behavior would make it very obvious that there is a bug! If it does not crash, we might observe that the program just behaves strangely from time to time, which could lead to even more headaches than a crashing program. The experienced programmer might add some checks before any directly indexed vector access. Such checks do not increase the readability of the code, and many people do not know that std::vector already has built-in bound checks!

How to do it...

In this section, we will use the two different ways to access...