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

Dealing with weak pointers to shared objects


In the recipe about shared_ptr, we learned how useful and easy to use shared pointers are. Together with unique_ptr, they pose an invaluable improvement for code that needs to manage dynamically allocated objects.

Whenever we copy shared_ptr, we increment its internal reference counter. As long as we hold our shared pointer copy, the object being pointed to will not be deleted. But what if we want some kind of weak pointer, which enables us to get at the object as long as it exists but does not prevent its destruction? And how do we determine if the object still exists, then?

In such situations, weak_ptr is our companion. It is a little bit more complicated to use than unique_ptr and shared_ptr, but after following this recipe, we will be ready to use it.

How to do it...

We will implement a program that maintains objects with shared_ptr instances, and then, we mix in weak_ptr to see how this changes the behavior of smart pointer memory handling:

  1. At...