Book Image

Modern C++ Programming Cookbook - Third Edition

By : Marius Bancila
Book Image

Modern C++ Programming Cookbook - Third Edition

By: Marius Bancila

Overview of this book

The updated third edition of Modern C++ Programming Cookbook addresses the latest features of C++23, such as the stack library, the expected and mdspan types, span buffers, formatting library improvements, and updates to the ranges library. It also gets into more C++20 topics not previously covered, such as sync output streams and source_location. The book is organized in the form of practical recipes covering a wide range of real-world problems. It gets into the details of all the core concepts of modern C++ programming, such as functions and classes, iterators and algorithms, streams and the file system, threading and concurrency, smart pointers and move semantics, and many others. You will cover the performance aspects of programming in depth, and learning to write fast and lean code with the help of best practices. You will explore useful patterns and the implementation of many idioms, including pimpl, named parameter, attorney-client, and the factory pattern. A chapter dedicated to unit testing introduces you to three of the most widely used libraries for C++: Boost.Test, Google Test, and Catch2. By the end of this modern C++ programming book, you will be able to effectively leverage the features and techniques of C++11/14/17/20/23 programming to enhance the performance, scalability, and efficiency of your applications.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
13
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14
Index

Implementing the pimpl idiom

pimpl stands for pointer to implementation (also known as the Cheshire cat idiom or the compiler firewall idiom) and is an opaque pointer technique that enables the separation of the implementation details from an interface. This has the advantage that it enables changing the implementation without modifying the interface and, therefore, avoiding the need to recompile the code that is using the interface. This has the potential of making libraries using the pimpl idiom on their ABIs backward-compatible with older versions when only implementation details change. In this recipe, we will see how to implement the pimpl idiom using modern C++ features.

The term ABI stands for Application Binary Interface, and refers to the interface between two binary modules. Typically, one such module is a library or operating system, and the other is a program executed by a user.

Getting ready

The reader is expected to be familiar with smart pointers...