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

Simplifying resource handling of legacy APIs with smart pointers


Smart pointers (unique_ptr, shared_ptr, and weak_ptr) are extremely useful, and it is, in general, safe to say that a programmer should always use these instead of allocating and freeing memory manually.

But what if objects cannot be allocated using the new operator and/or cannot be freed again using delete? Many legacy libraries come with their own allocation/destruction functions. It seems that this would be a problem because we learned that smart pointers rely on new and delete. If the creation and/or destruction of specific types of objects relies on specific factory functions' deleter interfaces, does this prevent us from getting the humongous benefits of smart pointers?

Not at all. In this recipe, we will see that we only need to perform very minimal customizations on smart pointers in order to let them follow specific procedures for allocation and destruction of specific objects.

How to do it...

In this section, we will...