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

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...