Last week, Jon Kalb and Phil Nash, the organizers of C++Chat, invited Kate Gregory and I on the show to discuss “Simplicity” in C++ code, and in designing code in general. We had a very interesting discussion, that includes topics such as: how to measure complexity, coupling in code, levels of abstraction, the hard decisions […]
Today’s guest post is written by guest author Miguel Raggi. Miguel is a Computer Science and Math professor at UNAM, Mexico’s largest university. He loves clean, expressive, performant C++ code (and strives to convince students to write it in this way!). Miguel is the author of discreture, an open source C++ library to efficiently generate […]
While working on the NamedType library I came across a situation that left me stunned in bewilderment: a const reference that allows modification of the object it refers to. Without a const_cast. Without a mutable. Without anything up the sleeve. How can this be? And how to enforce the const in that const reference? A const reference […]
Everyone knows that it’s a good thing to know the STL algorithms. But do know each and every one of them? To learn all there is in the STL algorithms library, I’ve presented a talk at several conferences this year, that was titled 105 STL Algorithms in Less Than an Hour. The point of this […]
We all know that we should know our STL algorithms, because they help make our code more expressive and more robust (sometimes in spectacular ways!). But do you know all your STL algorithms? There are 105 of them if we include those of C++17, and every one of them has a chance to be useful […]
In the previous post we’ve seen how to introduce variadic templates into the CRTP pattern, and how it allowed to create classes with various sets of opt-in features. For instance, the class X would have a basic interface but also augment them by inheriting from a set of CRTP base classes: template<template<typename> typename… Skills> class X […]
Summer is coming! About the same time last year, I released my 7 ways to get better at C++ during summer, and it nudged a lot of developers into taking on summer projects, to hone their skills for the coming year. That’s cool and the good news is, during this year, I’ve built up another […]
Last week we’ve seen the technique of the variadic CRTP, that allowed to plug in generic extra features to a class. For instance, we’ve seen the following class X: template<template<typename> typename… Skills> class X : public Skills<X<Skills…>>… { public: void basicMethod(); }; X can accept extra features that plug into its template parameters: using X12 = […]
The CRTP is a technique that allows to add extra features to a class. Variadic templates, brought by C++11, make this technique more powerful by adding a new aspect to it: composition. Combining the CRTP with variadic templates generates customizable classes, by opting in for a various set of features, and with a expressive syntax. […]
This article is a guest post written by guest author jft. C++17 has brought a lot of features to the C++ language. Let’s dig into three of them that help make coding easier, more concise, intuitive and correct. We’ll begin with Structured Bindings. These were introduced as a means to allow a single definition to […]
