Book Image

Template Metaprogramming with C++

By : Marius Bancila
5 (1)
Book Image

Template Metaprogramming with C++

5 (1)
By: Marius Bancila

Overview of this book

Learn how the metaprogramming technique enables you to create data structures and functions that allow computation to happen at compile time. With this book, you'll realize how templates help you avoid writing duplicate code and are key to creating generic libraries, such as the standard library or Boost, that can be used in a multitude of programs. The introductory chapters of this book will give you insights into the fundamentals of templates and metaprogramming. You'll then move on to practice writing complex templates and exploring advanced concepts such as template recursion, template argument deduction, forwarding references, type traits, and conditional compilation. Along the way, you'll learn how to write variadic templates and how to provide requirements to the template arguments with C++20 constraints and concepts. Finally, you'll apply your knowledge of C++ metaprogramming templates to implement various metaprogramming patterns and techniques. By the end of this book, you'll have learned how to write effective templates and implement metaprogramming in your everyday programming journey.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Part 1: Core Template Concepts
5
Part 2: Advanced Template Features
9
Part 3: Applied Templates
Appendix: Closing Notes

Summary

This chapter was dedicated to seeing how templates can be used to build general-purpose libraries. Although we couldn’t cover these topics in great detail, we have explored the design of containers, iterators, and algorithms from the C++ standard library. These are the pillars of the standard library. We spent most of the chapter understanding what it takes to write a container similar to the standard ones as well as an iterator class to provide access to its elements. For this purpose, we implemented a class that represents a circular buffer, a data structure of fixed size where elements are overwritten once the container is full. Lastly, we implemented a general-purpose algorithm that zips elements from two ranges. This works for any container including the circular buffer container.

Ranges, as discussed in this chapter, are an abstract concept. However, that changed with C++20, which introduced a more concrete concept of ranges with the new ranges library. This...