With the introduction of C++17, the C++ Standard Library expanded its capabilities for converting text to numbers with the addition of std::from_chars. This low-level, high-performance API offers significant advantages over previous methods, such as atoi and stringstream. In this article, we will explore the evolution of string conversion routines from C++17 through C++26, highlighting key improvements like constexpr support and enhanced error handling.

In this article, you’ll learn why std::initializer_list has a bad reputation in C++. Is passing values using it as efficient as “emplace”? How can we use non-copyable types? You’ll also see how to fix some of the problems. Let’s start with the issues first: Updated in Sept 2024: Added note about stack overflow and C++26 fixes.

Imagine you’re developing a tool that needs to scan for file changes across thousands of project files. Retrieving file attributes efficiently becomes critical for such scenarios. In this article, I’ll demonstrate a technique to get file attributes that can achieve a surprising speedup of over 50+ times compared to standard Windows methods.

The evolution of the C++ language continues to bring powerful features that enhance code safety, readability, and maintainability. Among these improvements, we got changes and additions to enum class functionalities across C++17, C++20, and C++23. In this blog post, we’ll explore these advancements, focusing on initialization improvements in C++17, the introduction of the using enum keyword in C++20, and the std::to_underlying utility in C++23.

Working with the filesystem can be a daunting task, but it doesn’t have to be. In this post, I’ll walk you through some of the most common filesystem operations using the powerful features introduced in C++17, as well as some new enhancements in C++20/23. Whether you’re creating directories, copying files, or managing permissions, these examples will help you understand and efficiently utilize the std::filesystem library.

In this blog post, we’ll examine the potentially simple task of getting and displaying file time. Usually, we can depend on some library or OS-specific code to get that file property. Fortunately, since C++20, we have a reliable and simple technique from the std::filesystem and std::chrono components. Let’s jump in.

Although C++ is an old programming language, its Standard Library misses a few basic things. Features that Java or .NET had for years were/are not available in STL. With C++17 there’s a nice improvement: for example, we now have the standard filesystem! Traversing a path, even recursively, is so simple now!

In this blog post, we’ll show how to implement a custom pipe operator and apply it to a data processing example. Thanks to C++23 and std::expectedwe can write a rather efficient framework that easily handles unexpected outcomes. This is a collaborative guest post by prof. Bogusław Cyganek: Prof. Cyganek is a researcher and lecturer at the Department of Electronics, AGH University of Science and Technology in Cracow, Poland.

std::expected from C++23 not only serves as an error-handling mechanism but also introduces functional programming paradigms into the language. In this blog post, we’ll have a look at functional/monadic extensions of std::expected, which allow us to chain operations elegantly, handling errors at the same time. The techniques are very similar to std::optional extensions - see How to Use Monadic Operations for `std::optional` in C++23 - C++ Stories.

In the article about std::expected, I introduced the type and showed some basic examples, and in this text, you’ll learn how it is implemented. A simple idea with struct   In short, std::expected should contain two data members: the actual expected value and the unexpected error object. So, in theory, we could use a simple structure:

In this article, we’ll go through a new vocabulary type introduced in C++23. std::expected is a type specifically designed to return results from a function, along with the extra error information. Motivation   Imagine you’re expecting a certain result from a function, but oops… things don’t always go as planned:

Thanks to the powerful constexpr keyword and many enhancements in recent C++ standards, we can now perform a lot of computations at compile time. In this text, we’ll explore several techniques for parsing integers, including the “naive” approach, C++23, from_chars, std::optional, std::expected, and even some upcoming features in C++26. But first… why would this even be needed?