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

Making your own iterators compatible with STL iterator categories


Whatever own container data structure we come up with, in order to effectively mix it with all the STL goodness, we need to make them provide iterator interfaces. In the last section, we learned how to do that, but we do soon realize that some STL algorithms do not compile well with our custom iterators. Why?

The problem is that a lot of STL algorithms try to find out more about the iterators they are asked by us to deal with. Different iterator categories have different capabilities, and hence, there might be different possibilities to implement the same algorithm. For example, if we copy plain numbers from one std::vector to another, this may be implemented with a fast memcpy call. If we copy data from or to std::list, this is not possible any longer and the items have to be copied individually one by one. The implementers of the STL algorithms put a lot of thought into this kind of automatic optimization. In order to help...