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

More Information

Authors | Praise | Guidelines for Authors | GNU Free Documentation License

More C++ Idioms Recent Changes RSS 2.0

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

Advanced idioms

These are some more advanced C++ idioms.

1. Envelope Letter TODO

Deprecated idioms

1. Const auto_ptr

page traffic for this month.