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

Templates – Generic Programming

As a computer scientist, or as a programming enthusiast, at some point in time, you probably had to write one (or more) sort algorithms. When discussing the algorithm, you were not particularly concerned about the type of data being sorted, just that the two objects of that type could be compared and that the domain is a totally ordered set (that is, if one object is compared with any other, you can determine which comes first). Different programming languages provide different solutions to this problem:

  • Python: A dynamic language with built-in function sort and member functions on list. As a dynamic language, it does not need to concern itself with the type if it can call the comparison operator and a swap function.
  • C: This has a function in its standard library called qsort that has the following signature:

    void qsort (void* base, size_t num, size_t size,               ...