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 memory in C++


C++ uses the same syntax as C to declare pointer variables and assign them to memory addresses, and it has C-like pointer arithmetic. Like C, C++ also allows you to allocate memory on the stack, so there is automatic memory cleanup when the stack frame is destroyed, and dynamic allocation (on the C++ free store) where the programmer has the responsibility to release memory. This section will cover these concepts.

Using C++ pointer syntax

The syntax to access memory in C++ is straightforward. The & operator returns the address of an object. That object can be a variable, a built-in type or the instance of a custom type, or even a function (function pointers will be covered in the next chapter). The address is assigned a typed pointer variable or a void* pointer. A void* pointer should be treated as merely storage for the memory address because you cannot access data and you cannot perform pointer arithmetic (that is, manipulate the pointer value using arithmetic operators...