More C++ Idioms

Preface

C++ has indeed become too "expert friendly" -- Bjarne Stroustrup, The Problem with Programming, Technology Review, Nov 2006. Stroustrup's saying is true because experts are intimately familiar with the idioms in the language. With the increase in the idioms a programmer understands, the language becomes friendlier to them. The objective of this open content book is to present modern C++ idioms to programmers who have moderate level of familiarity with C++, and help elevate their knowledge so that C++ feels much friendlier to them. It is designed to be an exhaustive catalog of reusable idioms that expert C++ programmers often use while programming or designing using C++. This is an effort to capture their techniques and vocabulary into a single work. This book describes the idioms in a regular format: Name-Intent-Motivation-Solution-References, which is succinct and helps speed learning. By their nature, idioms tend to have appeared in the C++ community and in published work many times. An effort has been made to refer to the original source(s) where possible; if you find a reference incomplete or incorrect, please feel free to suggest or make improvements. The world is invited to catalog reusable pieces of C++ knowledge (similar to the book on design patterns by GoF). The goal here is to first build an exhaustive catalog of modern C++ idioms and later evolve it into an idiom language, just like a pattern language. Finally, the contents of this book can be redistributed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. Aimed toward: Anyone with an intermediate level of knowledge in C++ and supported language paradigms

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Table of Contents

Note: synonyms for each idiom are listed in parentheses.

1. Acyclic Visitor Pattern TODO
2. Address Of
3. Algebraic Hierarchy
4. Attach by Initialization
5. Attorney-Client
6. Barton-Nackman trick
7. Base-from-Member
8. Boost mutant
9. Calling Virtuals During Initialization
10. Capability Query
11. Checked delete
12. Clear-and-minimize
13. Coercion by Member Template
14. Computational Constructor
15. Concrete Data Type
16. Construct On First Use
17. Construction Tracker
18. Copy-and-swap
19. Copy-on-write
20. Intrusive reference counting (Counted Body)
21. Covariant Return Types TODO
22. Curiously Recurring Template Pattern (CRTP)
23. Deprecate and Delete TODO
24. Empty Base Optimization (EBO)
25. enable-if
26. Erase-Remove
27. Execute-Around Pointer
28. Exploding Return Type TODO
29. Export Guard Macro TODO
30. Expression-template
31. Fake Vtable TODO
32. Fast Pimpl TODO
33. Final Class
34. Free Function Allocators
35. Function Object TODO
36. Function Poisoning TODO
37. Generic Container Idioms
38. Hierarchy Generation TODO
39. Implicit conversions TODO
40. Include Guard Macro
41. Inline Guard Macro
42. Inner Class
43. Int-To-Type
44. Interface Class
45. Iterator Pair
46. Making New Friends
47. Metafunction
48. Move Constructor
49. Multi-statement Macro
50. Member Detector
51. Named Constructor
52. Named External Argument TODO
53. Named Loop (labeled loop)
54. Named Parameter
55. Named Template Parameters TODO
56. Nifty Counter (Schwarz Counter)
57. Non-copyable Mixin
58. Non-member Non-friend Function TODO
59. Non-throwing swap
60. Non-Virtual Interface (NVI, Public Overloaded Non-Virtuals Call Protected Non-Overloaded Virtuals)
61. nullptr
62. Object Generator
63. Object Template TODO
64. Parameterized Base Class (Parameterized Inheritance)
65. Pimpl (Handle Body, Compilation Firewall, Cheshire Cat)
66. Policy Clone (Metafunction wrapper)
67. Policy-based Design TODO
68. Polymorphic Exception
69. Polymorphic Value Types TODO
70. Recursive Type Composition TODO
71. Requiring or Prohibiting Heap-based Objects
72. Resource Acquisition Is Initialization (RAII, Execute-Around Object, Scoped Locking)
73. Resource Return
74. Return Type Resolver
75. Runtime Static Initialization Order Idioms
76. Safe bool
77. Scope Guard
78. Substitution Failure Is Not An Error (SFINAE)
79. Shortening Long Template Names TODO
80. Shrink-to-fit
81. Small Object Optimization TODO
82. Smart Pointer
83. Storage Class Tracker TODO
84. Tag Dispatching TODO
85. Temporary Base Class
86. Temporary Proxy
87. The result_of technique TODO
88. Thin Template
89. Thread-Safe Interface TODO
90. Traits TODO
91. Type Erasure
92. Type Generator (Templated Typedef)
93. Type Safe Enum
94. Type Selection
95. Virtual Constructor
96. Virtual Friend Function

Advanced idioms

These are some more advanced C++ idioms.

1. Envelope Letter TODO

Deprecated idioms

1. Const auto_ptr

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