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

Variadic templates

Probably the greatest difference between generic programming in C and C++ is type safety. It is possible to write generic code in C—the standard function qsort() is a perfect example—it can sort values of any type and they are passed in using a void* pointer, which can really be a pointer to any type. Of course, the programmer has to know what the real type is and cast the pointer to the right type. In a generic C++ program, the types are either explicitly specified or deduced at the time of the instantiation, and the type system for generic types is as strong as it is for regular types. Unless we want a function with an unknown number of arguments, that is, prior to C++11, the only way was the old C-style variadic functions where the compiler had no idea what the argument types were; the programmer just had to know and unpack the variable arguments correctly.

C++11 introduced the modern equivalent to a variadic function—a variadic template...