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?

C++ grows very fast! For example, the number of pages of the C++ standard went from 879 pages for C++98/03 to 1834 for C++20! Nearly 1000 pages! What’s more, with each revision of C++, we get several dozens of new features. Have a look at my blog post with all C++17 features, it shows 48 items, and my C++20 reference card lists 47 elements!

Variadic templates and argument packs which are available since C++11 give flexibility in situations when you don’t know the number of inputs upfront. However, they are limited and can only appear at the end of the type sequence. Have a look at today’s blog post from Jonathan Boccara, who describes a technique that might improve this situation.

Since a few months, I’ve been refactoring my old C++/OpenGL project. Thus far, I used compilers (MSVC and Clang), my knowledge or free tools. At some point, I also got a chance to leverage a solid static analysis tool - PVS-Studio. The tool helped me with identifying 8 critical issues not to mention good code style and performance enhancements (in total 137 warnings)