I’m happy to announce the print/paperback version of C++ Lambda Story! After more than a year of updates and smaller changes, the whole project is completed! You can now purchase the book in lots of different formats. See details of this major update and also take part in a giveaway and get the book for free :)

Last time in A Debugging Tip: Write Custom Visualizers in Visual Studio, I introduced the Visual Studio’s Natvis Framework and showed you a couple of samples. That article was just a basic introduction, and now it’s time to see more experiments. Learn From Existing Code   First of all, we can examine existing code that is shipped with Visual Studio and see how it works.

In Visual Studio, when you work with types from the C++ Standard Library or other common APIs, you might be familiar with a concise view of those objects in debugger. You can hover a mouse over an entity, and then the debugger presents short information about their current state. For example:

While 2020 was a crazy and hard year we were fortunate - C++20 was accepted and published, and the work on new features continues. As usually every year, here’s my overview of the year: the standardization process, features, implementation, compilers, tools, books and more. Other Reports: 2020 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012.

Last time in my blog post about How to Share Code with Const and Non-Const Functions in C++ I had a custom type declared and defined in one place (like in a header file). Recently, I tried to separate the declaration from implementation, and I got into a situation where one private function template was left.

I’m happy to announce a new update to my book on lambda expressions! A few pages more, and what’s important is that I heavily improved the consistency and some wording. All of that, thanks to valuable input from my readers and C++ experts. And today we’ll also have a look at one wording case - what’s a functor?

Lambda Capturing syntax allows us to quickly “wrap” a variable from the outside scope and then use it in the lambda body. We also know that under the hood the compiler translates lambda into a closure type… but what happens to those captured variables? Are they translated to public data members or private?

During the development of a container-like type, I run into the problem of how to share code between a const and non-const member functions. In this article, I’d like to explain what are the issues and possible solutions. We can even go on a bleeding edge and apply some C++20 features.

Runtime polymorphism usually connects with v-tables and virtual functions. However, in this blog post, I’ll show you a modern C++ technique that leverages std::variant and std::visit. This C++17 technique might offer not only better performance and value semantics but also interesting design patterns. Last Update: 2nd Nov 2020 (Passing arguments, Build time benchmark, fixes).

Continuing the topic from last week, let’s dive into the topic of std::invoke. This helper template function helps with uniform syntax call for various callable object types and can greately reduce the complexity of our generic code. Ranges and Projections   In C++20 there are handful of rangified algorithms. As a simple example let’s say we want to sort a vector of integers:

When you see an article about new C++ features, most of the time you’ll have a description of major elements. Looking at C++17, there are a lot of posts (including articles from this blog) about structured bindings, filesystem, parallel algorithms, if constexpr, std::optional, std::variant… and other prominent C++17 additions. But how about some smaller parts?

With the addition of Ranges and Concepts in C++20, our good old algorithm interfaces got super long “rangified” versions. For example, copy is now 4 lines long… and it’s just the declaration! template <ranges::input_range R, std::weakly_incrementable O> requires std::indirectly_copyable<ranges::iterator_t<R>, O> constexpr ranges::copy_result<ranges::borrowed_iterator_t<R>, O> copy(R&& r, O result); How to decipher such a long declaration?