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)

Summary

The swap functionality in C++ is used to implement several important patterns. The most critical one is the copy-and-swap implementation of exception-safe transactions. All standard library containers, and most other STL objects, provide the swap member function that is fast and, when possible, does not throw exceptions. User-defined types that need to support swap should follow the same pattern. Note, however, that implementing a non-throwing swap function usually requires an extra indirection and goes against several optimization patterns. In addition to the member function swap, we have reviewed the use and the implementation of the non-member swap. Given that std::swap is always available, and can be called on any copyable or movable objects, the programmer should take care to implement a non-member swap function too, if a better way to swap exists for a given type...