Book Image

Modern C++ Programming Cookbook

By : Marius Bancila
Book Image

Modern C++ Programming Cookbook

By: Marius Bancila

Overview of this book

C++ is one of the most widely used programming languages. Fast, efficient, and flexible, it is used to solve many problems. The latest versions of C++ have seen programmers change the way they code, giving up on the old-fashioned C-style programming and adopting modern C++ instead. Beginning with the modern language features, each recipe addresses a specific problem, with a discussion that explains the solution and offers insight into how it works. You will learn major concepts about the core programming language as well as common tasks faced while building a wide variety of software. You will learn about concepts such as concurrency, performance, meta-programming, lambda expressions, regular expressions, testing, and many more in the form of recipes. These recipes will ensure you can make your applications robust and fast. By the end of the book, you will understand the newer aspects of C++11/14/17 and will be able to overcome tasks that are time-consuming or would break your stride while developing.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Implementing the pimpl idiom


PIMPL stands for pointer to implementation (but is also known as the Cheshire cat idiom or the compiler firewall idiom) and is an opaque pointer technique that enables the separation of the implementation details from an interface. This has the advantage that it enables changing the implementation without modifying the interface and, therefore, avoiding the need to recompile the code that is using the interface. This has the potential of making libraries using the pimpl idiom on their ABIs that are backward compatible with older versions when only implementation details change. In this recipe, we will see how to implement the pimpl idiom using modern C++ features.

Getting ready

The reader is expected to be familiar with smart pointers and std::string_view, both discussed in previous chapters of this book.

To demonstrate the pimpl idiom in a practical manner, we will consider the following class that we will then refactor following the pimpl pattern. The class represents...