Preface

C++ is one of the most popular and widely used programming languages, and it has been that way for three decades. Designed with a focus on performance, efficiency, and flexibility, C++ combines paradigms such as object-oriented, imperative, generic, and functional programming. C++ is standardized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and has undergone massive changes over the last decade and a half. With the standardization of C++11, the language has entered a new age, which has been widely referred to as modern C++. Type inference, move semantics, lambda expressions, smart pointers, uniform initialization, variadic templates, and many other recent features have changed the way we write code in C++ to the point that it almost looks like a new programming language. This change has been further advanced with the release of C++20, which includes many new changes to the language, such as modules, concepts, and coroutines, as well as changes to the standard library, such as ranges, text formatting, and calendars. And now, the language is moving even further with more changes introduced in C++23 and the upcoming C++26.

This book addresses many of the new features included in C++11, C++14, C++17, C++20, and C++23. This book is organized into recipes, each covering one particular language or library feature, or a common problem that developers often face and the typical solution to it using modern C++. Through more than 150 recipes, you will learn to master both core language features and the standard libraries; including those for strings, containers, algorithms, iterators, streams, regular expressions, threads, filesystem, atomic operations, utilities, and ranges.

This third edition of the book took several months to write, and during this time the work on the C++23 standard has been completed. However, at the time of writing this preface, the standard is yet to be approved and will be published this year (2024).

More than 30 new or updated recipes in the second and third editions cover C++20 features, including modules, concepts, coroutines, ranges, threads and synchronization mechanisms, text formatting, calendars and time zones, immediate functions, the three-way comparison operator, and the new std::span class. Almost 20 new or updated recipes in this third edition cover C++23 features, including the std::expected class, the std::mdspan class, the stacktrace library, the span buffer, the multi-dimensional subscript operator, and the additions to the text format library.

All the recipes in the book contain code samples that show you how to use a feature or how to solve a problem. These code samples have been written using Visual Studio 2022, but have also been compiled using Clang and GCC. Since the support for various language and library features has been gradually added to all these compilers, it is recommended that you use the latest version of each to ensure that all of the new features are supported.

At the time of writing this preface, the latest versions are GCC 14.0, Clang 18.0, and VC++ 2022 version 14.37 (from Visual Studio 2019 version 17.7). Although all these compilers are C++17 complete, the support for C++23 varies from compiler to compiler. Please refer to https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/compiler_support to check your compiler’s support for C++23 features.