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

Swap – from Simple to Subtle

We begin our exploration of basic C++ idioms with a very simple, even humble, operation—swap. The notion of swap refers to two objects exchanging places—after the swap, the first object keeps its name, but otherwise looks like the second object used to, and vice versa. This operation is so fundamental to C++ classes that the standard provides a template, std::swap, to do just that. Rest assured that C++ manages to turn even something as basic as a swap into a complex issue with subtle nuances.

The following topics are covered in this chapter:

  • How is swap used by the standard C++ library?
  • What are the applications of swap?
  • How can we write exception-safe code using swap?
  • How can we implement swap for our own types correctly?
  • How can we correctly swap variables of an arbitrary type?