Book Image

Hands-On Design Patterns with C++

By : Fedor G. Pikus
Book Image

Hands-On Design Patterns with C++

By: Fedor G. Pikus

Overview of this book

C++ is a general-purpose programming language designed with the goals of efficiency, performance, and flexibility in mind. Design patterns are commonly accepted solutions to well-recognized design problems. In essence, they are a library of reusable components, only for software architecture, and not for a concrete implementation. The focus of this book is on the design patterns that naturally lend themselves to the needs of a C++ programmer, and on the patterns that uniquely benefit from the features of C++, in particular, the generic programming. Armed with the knowledge of these patterns, you will spend less time searching for a solution to a common problem and be familiar with the solutions developed from experience, as well as their advantages and drawbacks. The other use of design patterns is as a concise and an efficient way to communicate. A pattern is a familiar and instantly recognizable solution to specific problem; through its use, sometimes with a single line of code, we can convey a considerable amount of information. The code conveys: "This is the problem we are facing, these are additional considerations that are most important in our case; hence, the following well-known solution was chosen." By the end of this book, you will have gained a comprehensive understanding of design patterns to create robust, reusable, and maintainable code.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)

When and why to use swap

What is so important about the swap functionality that it deserves its own chapter? For that matter, why even use swap, and not continue to refer to an object by its original name? Mostly, it has to do with exception safety, which is also why we keep mentioning when swap can and cannot throw an exception.

Swap and exception safety

The most important application of swap in C++ has to do with writing exception-safe code, or, more generally, error-safe code. Here is the problem, in a nutshell—in an exception-safe program, throwing an exception should never leave the program in an undefined state. More generally, an error condition should never leave the program in an undefined state. Note that...