Book Image

Modern C++ Programming Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Marius Bancila
5 (1)
Book Image

Modern C++ Programming Cookbook - Second Edition

5 (1)
By: Marius Bancila

Overview of this book

C++ has come a long way to be one of the most widely used general-purpose languages that is fast, efficient, and high-performance at its core. The updated second edition of Modern C++ Programming Cookbook addresses the latest features of C++20, such as modules, concepts, coroutines, and the many additions to the standard library, including ranges and text formatting. The book is organized in the form of practical recipes covering a wide range of problems faced by modern developers. The book also delves into the details of all the core concepts in modern C++ programming, such as functions and classes, iterators and algorithms, streams and the file system, threading and concurrency, smart pointers and move semantics, and many others. It goes into the performance aspects of programming in depth, teaching developers how to write fast and lean code with the help of best practices. Furthermore, the book explores useful patterns and delves into the implementation of many idioms, including pimpl, named parameter, and attorney-client, teaching techniques such as avoiding repetition with the factory pattern. There is also a chapter dedicated to unit testing, where you are introduced to three of the most widely used libraries for C++: Boost.Test, Google Test, and Catch2. By the end of the book, you will be able to effectively leverage the features and techniques of C++11/14/17/20 programming to enhance the performance, scalability, and efficiency of your applications.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
13
Bibliography
14
Other Books You May Enjoy
15
Index

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, 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. This is because you can get into a situation where the number is not actually large enough. The standard alternative for this is to use the std::vector<bool> container, which is a specialization of std::vector with space and speed optimizations since implementations do not actually store Boolean values, but individual bits for each element.

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...