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

Providing metadata to the compiler with attributes

C++ has been very deficient when it comes to features that enable reflection or introspection on types or data or standard mechanisms to define language extensions. Because of that, compilers have defined their own specific extensions for this purpose. Examples include the VC++ __declspec() specifier or the GCC __attribute__((...)). C++11, however, introduces the concept of attributes, which enable compilers to implement extensions in a standard way or even embedded domain-specific languages. The new C++ standards define several attributes all compilers should implement, and that will be the topic of this recipe.

How to do it...

Use standard attributes to provide hints for the compiler about various design goals such as in the scenarios listed here, but not only these:

  • To ensure that the return value from a function cannot be ignored, declare the function with the [[nodiscard]] attribute. In C++20, you can specify a string literal,...