Book Image

Expert C++

By : Vardan Grigoryan, Shunguang Wu
5 (1)
Book Image

Expert C++

5 (1)
By: Vardan Grigoryan, Shunguang Wu

Overview of this book

C++ has evolved over the years and the latest release – C++20 – is now available. Since C++11, C++ has been constantly enhancing the language feature set. With the new version, you’ll explore an array of features such as concepts, modules, ranges, and coroutines. This book will be your guide to learning the intricacies of the language, techniques, C++ tools, and the new features introduced in C++20, while also helping you apply these when building modern and resilient software. You’ll start by exploring the latest features of C++, and then move on to advanced techniques such as multithreading, concurrency, debugging, monitoring, and high-performance programming. The book will delve into object-oriented programming principles and the C++ Standard Template Library, and even show you how to create custom templates. After this, you’ll learn about different approaches such as test-driven development (TDD), behavior-driven development (BDD), and domain-driven design (DDD), before taking a look at the coding best practices and design patterns essential for building professional-grade applications. Toward the end of the book, you will gain useful insights into the recent C++ advancements in AI and machine learning. By the end of this C++ programming book, you’ll have gained expertise in real-world application development, including the process of designing complex software.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Section 1: Under the Hood of C++ Programming
7
Section 2: Designing Robust and Efficient Applications
17
Section 3: C++ in the AI World

Using smart pointers

There are many languages supporting automated garbage collection. For example, memory acquired for an object is tracked by the runtime environment. It will deallocate the memory space after the object with a reference to it goes out of the scope. Consider the following, for example:

// a code sample of the language (not-C++) supporting automated garbage collection
void foo(int age) {
Person p = new Person("John", 35);
if (age <= 0) { return; }
if (age > 18) {
p.setAge(18);
}
// do something useful with the "p"
}
// no need to deallocate memory manually

In the preceding code block, the p reference (usually, references in garbage-collected languages are similar to pointers in C++) refers to the memory location returned by the new operator. The automatic garbage collector manages the lifetime of the object created by the new operator...