Book Image

Boost C++ Application Development Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Anton Polukhin Alekseevic
Book Image

Boost C++ Application Development Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Anton Polukhin Alekseevic

Overview of this book

If you want to take advantage of the real power of Boost and C++ and avoid the confusion about which library to use in which situation, then this book is for you. Beginning with the basics of Boost C++, you will move on to learn how the Boost libraries simplify application development. You will learn to convert data such as string to numbers, numbers to string, numbers to numbers and more. Managing resources will become a piece of cake. You’ll see what kind of work can be done at compile time and what Boost containers can do. You will learn everything for the development of high quality fast and portable applications. Write a program once and then you can use it on Linux, Windows, MacOS, Android operating systems. From manipulating images to graphs, directories, timers, files, networking – everyone will find an interesting topic. Be sure that knowledge from this book won’t get outdated, as more and more Boost libraries become part of the C++ Standard.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Storing at most N elements in the sequence container


Here's a question: what container should we use to return the sequence from function if we know that the sequence never has more than N elements and N is not big. For example, how we must write the get_events() function that returns at most five events:

#include <vector>
std::vector<event> get_events();

The std::vector<event> allocates memory, so the code from earlier is not a good solution.

#include <boost/array.hpp>
boost::array<event, 5> get_events();

boost::array<event, 5> does not allocate memory, but it constructs all the five elements. There's no way to return less than five elements.

#include <boost/container/small_vector.hpp>
boost::container::small_vector<event, 5> get_events();

The boost::container::small_vector<event, 5> does not allocate memory for five or less elements and allows us to return less than five elements. However, the solution is not perfect, because it is not obvious...