In the previous post we’ve seen a very nice technique to use value semantics with inheritance and virtual methods, which was made possible by std::any. Given its usefulness, it would be interesting to better understand std::any. Indeed, std::any is sometimes said to be “the modern void*“. But it does much more than a void*. A […]
Inheritance is a useful but controversial technique in C++. There is even a famous talk by Sean Parent called Inheritance is the base class of evil. So inheritance is not the most popular feature of the C++ community. Nevertheless, inheritance is useful, and widely used by C++ developers. What is the problem of inheritance? It […]
I originally wrote this post for Bartek’s blog. Here is a link to the original post. In C++, the normal way of passing a variadic pack of parameters is at the last position of the function: template<typename A, typename… Bs> void f(A&& a, Bs&&… bs) { // implementation of f… } But what if the […]
Boost HOF, standing for Higher Order Functions, is a Boost library offering functions that work on functions. This impressive library provides a lot of advanced components allowing to go a step further into functional programming in C++. In this post, we’ll focus on 4 of the more basic ones (+ a bonus one) that allow […]
In C++, functions are called with a prefix syntax. This means that at call site, the function name is before the parameters: myFunction(parameter1, parameter2); ^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ function parameters On the other hand, binary operators such as operator+ are called with an infix syntax, which means that the operator is between the parameters: parameter1 + parameter2 Some […]
I’ve used the clang based include-what-you-use tool on a fairly large chunk of code — a couple of hundreds of files, containing dozens of includes each. That was an interesting experiment. Here are my takeaways on this powerful tool, what it can bring to your code, and a few things I wish I had known […]
Fluent C++ has turned 4 a couple of weeks ago. There was so much going on on the site that we didn’t take the time to celebrate. Let’s take advantage of the Christmas holiday to celebrate this 4 years birthday and take a look at the traditional highlights of the past year on Fluent C++. Thank […]
Design patterns are a must-know in programming today. The first reference to “design patterns” I know of is the famous GoF book: This book is a classic of programming and sits on the desk of many programmers across the world. The Design patterns described in this book are various ways to structure code to solve […]
There is a compilation error that occurs often when writing template code that uses dependent types. If you know what’s going on, it is easy to fix it immediately. But if you don’t, you can spend a while staring a what looks like reasonable code, and wondering why the complier won’t have it. I’ve been […]
AAA. Three letters that the C++ community associates to the early times of Modern C++. AAA. Almost Always Auto. Is this still valid today, now that C++20 is the latest standard? Exploring the reasons behind the AAA guideline allow to better understand auto and what it can express in our code. Especially since the guideline […]
