Book Image

Hands-On Design Patterns with C++ (Second Edition) - Second Edition

By : Fedor G. Pikus
5 (1)
Book Image

Hands-On Design Patterns with C++ (Second Edition) - Second Edition

5 (1)
By: Fedor G. Pikus

Overview of this book

C++ is a general-purpose programming language designed for efficiency, performance, and flexibility. 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. This book helps you focus on the design patterns that naturally adapt to your needs, and on the patterns that uniquely benefit from the features of C++. Armed with the knowledge of these patterns, you’ll spend less time searching for solutions to common problems and tackle challenges with the solutions developed from experience. You’ll also explore that design patterns are a concise and efficient way to communicate, as patterns are a familiar and recognizable solution to a specific problem and can convey a considerable amount of information with a single line of code. By the end of this book, you’ll have a deep understanding of how to use design patterns to write maintainable, robust, and reusable software.
Table of Contents (26 chapters)
1
Part 1: Getting Started with C++ Features and Concepts
5
Part 2: Common C++ Idioms
10
Part 3: C++ Design Patterns
18
Part 4: Advanced C++ Design Patterns

The Visitor Pattern and Multiple Dispatch

The Visitor pattern is another classic object-oriented design pattern, one of the 23 patterns introduced in the book Design Patterns – Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides. It was one of the more popular patterns during the golden age of object-oriented programming since it can be used to make large class hierarchies more maintainable. In recent years, the use of Visitor in C++ declined, as large complex hierarchies became less common, and the Visitor pattern is a fairly complex pattern to implement. Generic programming - in particular, the language features added in C++11 and C++14 - makes it easier to implement and maintain the Visitor classes, while the new applications of the old pattern have served to rekindle some of the fading interest in it.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

  • The Visitor pattern
  • Implementations of Visitor...