Book Image

Beginning C++ Programming

By : Richard Grimes
Book Image

Beginning C++ Programming

By: Richard Grimes

Overview of this book

C++ has come a long way and is now adopted in several contexts. Its key strengths are its software infrastructure and resource-constrained applications, including desktop applications, servers, and performance-critical applications, not to forget its importance in game programming. Despite its strengths in these areas, beginners usually tend to shy away from learning the language because of its steep learning curve. The main mission of this book is to make you familiar and comfortable with C++. You will finish the book not only being able to write your own code, but more importantly, you will be able to read other projects. It is only by being able to read others' code that you will progress from a beginner to an advanced programmer. This book is the first step in that progression. The first task is to familiarize you with the structure of C++ projects so you will know how to start reading a project. Next, you will be able to identify the main structures in the language, functions, and classes, and feel confident being able to identify the execution flow through the code. You will then become aware of the facilities of the standard library and be able to determine whether you need to write a routine yourself, or use an existing routine in the standard library. Throughout the book, there is a big emphasis on memory and pointers. You will understand memory usage, allocation, and access, and be able to write code that does not leak memory. Finally, you will learn about C++ classes and get an introduction to object orientation and polymorphism.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Application termination

The main function is the entry point for your application. However, this isn't called directly by the operating system because C++ will perform initialization before main is called. This includes constructing the Standard Library global objects (cin, cout, cerr, clog, and the wide character versions) and there is a whole host of initialization that is performed for the C Runtime Library that underpins C++ libraries. Further, there are the global and static objects that your code creates. When the main function returns, the destructors of global and static objects will have to be called and a clean-up performed on the C runtime.

There are several ways to stop a process deliberately. The simplest is to return from the main function, but this assumes that there is a simple route back to the main function from the point that your code wants to finish the...