Book Image

Modern C++: Efficient and Scalable Application Development

By : Richard Grimes, Marius Bancila
Book Image

Modern C++: Efficient and Scalable Application Development

By: Richard Grimes, Marius Bancila

Overview of this book

C++ is one of the most widely used programming languages. It is fast, flexible, and used to solve many programming problems. This Learning Path gives you an in-depth and hands-on experience of working with C++, using the latest recipes and understanding most recent developments. You will explore C++ programming constructs by learning about language structures, functions, and classes, which will help you identify the execution flow through code. You will also understand the importance of the C++ standard library as well as memory allocation for writing better and faster programs. Modern C++: Efficient and Scalable Application Development deals with the challenges faced with advanced C++ programming. You will work through advanced topics such as multithreading, networking, concurrency, lambda expressions, and many more recipes. By the end of this Learning Path, you will have all the skills to become a master C++ programmer. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: • Beginning C++ Programming by Richard Grimes • Modern C++ Programming Cookbook by Marius Bancila • The Modern C++ Challenge by Marius Bancila
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
12
Math Problems
13
Language Features
14
Strings and Regular Expressions
15
Streams and Filesystems
16
Date and Time
17
Algorithms and Data Structures
Index

Using Pointers in C++


Pointers are clearly very important in C++, but as with any powerful feature, there are issues and dangers, so it is worth pointing out some of the major issues. A pointer points to a single location in memory, and the type of the pointer indicates how the memory location should be interpreted. The very most you can assume is the number of bytes at that position in memory is the size of the type of the pointer. That's it. This means that pointers are inherently unsafe. However, in C++ they are the quickest way to enable code within your process to access large amounts of data.

Accessing out of Bounds

When you allocate a buffer, whether on the stack or on the free store, and you get a pointer, there is little to stop you from accessing memory you have not allocated--either before or after the position of the buffer. This means that when you use pointer arithmetic, or indexed access on arrays, that you check carefully that you are not going to access data out of bounds...