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

Efficiently modifying the keys of std::map items


Since the std::map data structure maps from keys to values in a way that the keys are always unique and sorted, it is of crucial value that users cannot modify the keys of map nodes that are already inserted. In order to prevent the user from modifying the key items of perfectly sorted map nodes, the const qualifier is added to the key type.

This kind of restriction is perfectly sane because it makes it harder for the user to use std::map the wrong way. But what shall we do if we really need to change the keys of some map items?

Prior to C++17, we had to remove the items of which we need to change the key value from the tree, in order to reinsert them. The downside of this approach is that this always needlessly reallocates some memory, which sounds bad in terms of performance.

Since C++17, we can remove and reinsert map nodes without any reallocation of memory. We will see how that works in this recipe. 

 

How to do it...

We implement a little...