In legacy code, you can often spot explicit new and delete lurking in various places and waiting to produce pointer-related issues. This blog post shows six patterns to improve that erroneous style and rely on modern techniques, especially unique_ptr and other helper standard types. Bonus point 1: if possible, we’ll also look at some existing code from open source projects!

While learning how to use the new C++ Standard, I encountered several intriguing cases with smart pointers. Casting? Array handling? Passing to functions? Let’s review some common concerns so that we don’t shoot yourself in the foot :) I created this post back in 2013, and I updated it in 2014 and recently in 2021.

Smart pointers available since C++11 are an essential foundation for writing secure code in Modern C++. Thanks to RAII (Resource Acquisition Is Initialization), they allow you to work with pointers to allocate memory or other managed objects efficiently. This blog post will show you the core points for working with those handy types.

What should happen when the data returned from a function is not valid? It might be an error or just how the system operates (embedded environment, a timeout). In this article, you’ll see a practical example from the robotics area where the vocabulary types from C++17 play important roles. This is a guest post written by Rud Merriam:

Two keywords, constexpr and virtual - can those two work together? Virtual implies runtime polymorphism, while constexpr suggests constant expression evaluation. It looks like we have a contradiction, does it? Read on and see why those conflicting terms might help us get simpler code. A basic example   Imagine that you work with some product list, and you want to check if a product fits in a given box size:

constexpr started small in C++11 but then, with each Standard revision, improved considerably. In C++20, we can say that there’s a culmination point as you can even use std::vector and std::string in constant expressions! Let’s look at use cases, required features to make it work, and finally, one significant limitation that we might want to solve in the future.

C++20 added a couple of new attributes in the form of [[attrib_name]]. One of them - [[no_unique_address]] - can have surprising effects on the code! In this blog post, you’ll learn how to optimize your classes’ layout and make some data members “disappear”. In most cases, it will be just one line of C++20 code.

C++ has many dark corners and many caveats that can cause you to scratch your head in confusion. One of the issues we had until C++17 was the evaluation order of expressions. In this blog post, I’ll show you the new rules that we got in C++17 that made this complicated term much simpler and practical.

At C++Stories (and in my C++17 book) you can find several articles on Parallel Algorithms introduced in C++17. The examples included in those posts were usually relatively straightforward. How about writing something larger? In this text, you’ll see how to build a tool that works on CSV files, parses lines into sales records and then performs calculations on the data.

I’m happy to announce that after few months of work, the C++ Lambda Story book got translation into Spanish! Have a look at the background story and learn more about Lambdas :) This post is possible with the effort of Javier Estrada. Javier is a software developer living in sunny Southern California, and while he has flirted with Java and Python in the past, his true love is C++.

In April, we got a new book - from two Polish authors - Piotr and Adrian - on C++ Software Architecture. This one is fascinating and refreshing. While it won’t teach you all the latest C++ features or low-level tricks in our favorite language, it will move you to a higher level with architecture, building, patterns, design, and development for the cloud.

The work on C++23 continues! Without the face-to-face meetings, the Committee gathers online and discusses proposals and new additions to the language. See my latest report on what changed in C++ in April, May, and June 2021. Let’s start! Disclaimer: the view presented here is mine and does not represent the opinion of the ISO C++ Committee.