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

Automatically checking iterator code with checked iterators


No matter how useful iterators are, and what generic interface they represent, iterators can easily be misused, just as pointers. When dealing with pointers, code must be written in a way that it never dereferences them when they point to invalid memory locations. Same applies to iterators, but there are a lot of rules that state when an iterator is valid and when it is invalidated. Those can easily be learned by studying the STL documentation a bit, but it will still always be possible to write buggy code.

In the best case, such buggy code blows up in front of the developer while it is being tested, and not on the client's machine. However, in many cases, the code just silently seems to work, although it dereferences dangling pointers, iterators, and so on. In such cases, we want to be eagerly alarmed if we produce code showing undefined behavior.

Fortunately, there's help! The GNU STL implementation has a debug mode, and the GNU...