Book Image

Advanced C++

By : Gazihan Alankus, Olena Lizina, Rakesh Mane, Vivek Nagarajan, Brian Price
5 (1)
Book Image

Advanced C++

5 (1)
By: Gazihan Alankus, Olena Lizina, Rakesh Mane, Vivek Nagarajan, Brian Price

Overview of this book

C++ is one of the most widely used programming languages and is applied in a variety of domains, right from gaming to graphical user interface (GUI) programming and even operating systems. If you're looking to expand your career opportunities, mastering the advanced features of C++ is key. The book begins with advanced C++ concepts by helping you decipher the sophisticated C++ type system and understand how various stages of compilation convert source code to object code. You'll then learn how to recognize the tools that need to be used in order to control the flow of execution, capture data, and pass data around. By creating small models, you'll even discover how to use advanced lambdas and captures and express common API design patterns in C++. As you cover later chapters, you'll explore ways to optimize your code by learning about memory alignment, cache access, and the time a program takes to run. The concluding chapter will help you to maximize performance by understanding modern CPU branch prediction and how to make your code cache-friendly. By the end of this book, you'll have developed programming skills that will set you apart from other C++ programmers.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
7
6. Streams and I/O

Specifying Types – Variables

As C++ is a statically typed language, it is necessary to specify the type of a variable when it is declared. When you declare a function, it is necessary to specify the return type and the types of arguments that are being passed to it. There are two choices for specifying the type to a variable when you declare it:

  • Explicitly: You, as the programmer, are dictating exactly what the type is.
  • Implicitly (using auto): You are telling the compiler to look at the value that was used to initialize the variable and determine its type. This is known as (auto) type deduction.

The general form of declaration for a scalar variable is one of the following:

type-specifier var;                       // 1. Default-initialized variable

type-specifier var = init-value;          // 2. Assignment initialized...