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 vector<bool> for variable-size sequences of bits


In the previous recipe, we looked at using std::bitset for fixed-size sequences of bits. Sometimes, however, an std::bitset is not a good choice because you do not know the number of bits at compile time, and just defining a set of a large enough number of bits is not a good idea because you can get into a situation when the number is not actually large enough. The standard alternative for this is to use the std::vector<bool> container that is a specialization of std::vector with space and speed optimizations, as implementations do not actually store Boolean values, but individual bits for each element.

Note

For this reason, however, std::vector<bool> does not meet the requirements of a standard container or sequential container, nor does std::vector<bool>::iterator meet the requirements of a forward iterator. As a result, this specialization cannot be used in generic code where a vector is expected. On the other...