Book Image

C++17 STL Cookbook

By : Jacek Galowicz
Book Image

C++17 STL Cookbook

By: Jacek Galowicz

Overview of this book

C++ has come a long way and is in use in every area of the industry. Fast, efficient, and flexible, it is used to solve many problems. The upcoming version of C++ will see programmers change the way they code. If you want to grasp the practical usefulness of the C++17 STL in order to write smarter, fully portable code, then this book is for you. Beginning with new language features, this book will help you understand the language’s mechanics and library features, and offers insight into how they work. Unlike other books, ours takes an implementation-specific, problem-solution approach that will help you quickly overcome hurdles. You will learn the core STL concepts, such as containers, algorithms, utility classes, lambda expressions, iterators, and more, while working on practical real-world recipes. These recipes will help you get the most from the STL and show you how to program in a better way. By the end of the book, you will be up to date with the latest C++17 features and save time and effort while solving tasks elegantly using the STL.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Automatically handling resources with std::unique_ptr


Since C++11, the STL provides smart pointers that really help keep track of dynamic memory and its disposal. Even before C++11, there was a class called auto_ptr that was already able to do automatic memory disposal, but it was easy to use the wrong way.

However, with the C++11-generation smart pointers, we seldom need to write new and delete ourselves, which is a really good thing. Smart pointers are a shiny example of automatic memory management. If we maintain dynamically allocated objects with unique_ptr, we are basically safe from memory leaks, because upon its destruction this class automatically calls delete on the object it maintains.

A unique pointer expresses ownership of the object it points to and follows its responsibility of freeing its memory again if it is no longer used. This class has the potential of relieving us forever from memory leaks (at least together with its companions shared_ptr and weak_ptr, but in this recipe...