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

Generating random numbers and choosing the right random number engine


In order to get random numbers for whatever purpose, C++ programmers usually basically used the rand() function of the C library before C++11. Since C++11, there has been a whole suite of random number generators that serve different purposes and have different characteristics.

These generators are not completely self-explanatory, so we will have a look at all of them in this recipe. In the end, we will see in what ways they differ, how to choose the right one, and that we will most probably never use all of them.

How to do it...

We will implement a procedure that prints a nice illustrating histogram of the numbers a random generator produces. Then, we will run all STL random number generator engines through this procedure and learn from the results. This program contains many repetitive lines, so it might be advantageous to just copy the source code from the code repository accompanying this book on the Internet instead...