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

Implementing an ASCII Mandelbrot renderer


In 1975, the mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot coined the term fractal. A fractal is a mathematical figure or set, which has certain interesting mathematical properties, but in the end, it just looks like a piece of art. Fractals also look infinitelyrepetitive when being zoomed in. One of the most popular fractals is the Mandelbrot set, which can be seen on the following poster:

A picture of the Mandelbrot set can be generated by iterating a specific formula:

The variables z and c are complex numbers. The Mandelbrot set consists of all such values of c for which the formula converges if it is applied often enough. This is the colored part of the poster. Some values converge earlier, some converge later, so they can be visualized with different colors. Some do not converge at all--these are painted black.

The STL comes with the useful std::complex class, and we will try to implement the formula without explicit loops, just for the sake of getting to know...