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 Be sure that knowledge from this book won’t get outdated, as more and more Boost libraries become part of the C++ Standard.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

Creating a type from a number


We have now seen examples of how we can choose between functions using boost::enable_if_c. Let's forget about that technique for this chapter and use a different approach. Consider the following example, where we have a generic method for processing POD datatypes:

#include <boost/static_assert.hpp> 
#include <boost/type_traits/is_pod.hpp> 

// Generic implementation. 
template <class T> 
T process(const T& val) { 
    BOOST_STATIC_ASSERT((boost::is_pod<T>::value)); 
    // ... 
}

We also have some processing functions optimized for sizes 1, 4, and 8 bytes. How do we rewrite the process function so that it can dispatch calls to optimized processing functions?

Getting ready

Reading at least the first recipe from this chapter is highly recommended, so that you will not be confused by all the things that are happening here. Templates and metaprogramming will not scare you (or just get ready to see a lot of them).

How to do it...

We are going...