Operator Overloading -- Arne Mertz

By Felix Petriconi | Jan 16, 2015 01:55 AM | Tags: basics

Arne Mertz describes in a series of articles the principles of operator overloading.

Operator Overloading

Operator Overloading: Common Practice

by Arne Mertz

From the articles:

Operators can be used to make user defined classes act like known types, e.g. like numbers, pointers and iterators. That way they facilitate the usage of those classes. They can also be used to make your objects do whatever you want them to do, for example build structures that save the operations for later evaluation. The latter is especially useful for building embedded DSLs and gives enough subject matter for a whole series of blog posts. [The first] post will cover the former use of operator overloading, i.e. writing operators that behave like “normal” operators.

... In [the second] post I will go into the details and write a bit about each operator and how a straight forward implementation might look if the operator is meant to work similar to built in operators.

The Rule of Zero -- Glennan Carnie

By Mantosh Kumar | Jan 15, 2015 06:18 PM | Tags: None

A complementary guideline to help to simplify the application code, without risking resource management issues.

The Rule of Zero

In a previous article – "The Rule of the Big Four (and a half)" we looked at resource management policies in C++.

Resource management is the general term for using the mechanisms in C++ to ensure that resources – files, dynamic memory, sockets, mutexes, etc – have their lifetimes automatically controlled so as to prevent resource leaks, deadlocks, etc. C++ refers to these mechanisms as RAII/RDID ( “Resource Acquisition Is Initialisation / Resource Destruction is Deletion”)

In this article we’ll have a look at a complementary guideline to help simplify your application code, without risking resource management issues – The Rule of Zero.

If you’re not familiar with the concepts of resource management I’d highly recommend having a look at the whitepaper before reading on.

C++ in 2015

By Meeting C++ | Jan 15, 2015 07:32 AM | Tags: community c++14 basics

My yearly overview on the things that might come:

C++ in 2015

by Jens Weller

From the article:

The year is still young, so lets have an outlook about what is going to happen in C++ Land in 2015...

Reader Q&A: auto and for loop index variables -- Herb Sutter

By Mantosh Kumar | Jan 14, 2015 06:58 PM | Tags: None

Discussion on how to use/replace auto for loop index variables.

Reader Q&A: auto and for loop index variables

by Herb Sutter

From the reader's question:

So I’ve been reading all I can about c++11/c++14 and beyond when time permits.  I like auto, I really do, I believe in it.  I have a small problem I’m trying to decide what to do about.  So in old legacy code we have things like this:

for (int i = 0; i < someObject.size(); i++) { … }

Implementing std::tuple From The Ground Up – Part 1--Sasha Goldshtein

By Adrien Hamelin | Jan 14, 2015 03:26 PM | Tags: intermediate c++11

Sasha Goldshtein begins to show us how to implement the basis of a useful tool from the STL: the tuple.

Implementing std::tuple From The Ground Up – Part 1

by Sasha Goldshtein

From the article:

std::tuple is a very nice facility originally introduced in C++ TR1. It is a heterogenous container of elements that has a statically known size. In C++ 11, std::tuple can be implemented using variadic templates; a single std::tuple class can support an arbitrary number of template type arguments. In this series of blog posts we will implement std::tuple from first principles. The purpose of this exercise is not to provide the best-performing or most-conformant tuple implementation, but rather to see what foundational concepts are required to implement it...

Raspberry Pi: Install GCC 4.9 and compile C++14 programs -- Sol

By Blog Staff | Jan 14, 2015 11:37 AM | Tags: None

Toward using a more modern C++ compiler:

Raspberry Pi -- Install GCC 4.9 and compile C++14 programs

by Sol

From the article:

...  I will show you next how to install only GCC 4.9 and his dependencies from Jessie and keep Wheezy as the default source for all the other packages. I’ve tested the next steps on a Raspberry Pi revision B+, but it should work on older models too...

Quick Q: How do I cast 'this' to std::shared_ptr? -- StackOverflow

By Blog Staff | Jan 14, 2015 10:33 AM | Tags: intermediate

Quick A: Inherit from enable_shared_from_this.

Recently on SO:

Cast 'this' to std::shared_ptr

I have a method on a class to make a particular instance an "active" instance:

void makeActive() { activeInstance = this; }

However it doesn't work since activeInstance has type std::shared_ptr< ClassName >. How can I cast this to std::shared_ptr<ClassName>?

Slides of Dec 17 BeCPP talks available -- Marc Gregoire

By Blog Staff | Jan 14, 2015 10:24 AM | Tags: None

Slides are now available from last month's Belgian C++ user group meeting:

Slides of the 17th of December 2014 BeCPP Meeting

by Marc Gregoire

There were two talks -- kudos for the pun in the second talk title:

• Marc Gregoire: "What's new in Microsoft Visual C++ 2015 Preview"
• Bert Rodiers: "Move semantics, rvalue references && perfect forwarding, part 1"

Defensive Programming -- Andrzej Krzemieński

By Blog Staff | Jan 12, 2015 05:02 PM | Tags: None

Note that the questions raised are good ones even if we would normally use & parameters for the non-null case.

Today on Andrzej's blog:

Defensive programming

by Andrzej Krzemieński

From the article:

Have you ever asked yourself, or participated in a discussion on whether “defensive programming”is a good or a bad thing? The issue is controversial, and recently, while watching talk “Defensive Programming Done Right, Part I” by John Lakos, I realized (I think) why. Term “undefined behavior” means different things to different people...

Discriminated Unions with boost::python and boost::variant - The Blind Guru

By Jeremy Wright | Jan 12, 2015 10:06 AM | Tags: variant python intermediate boost

A useful application of boost::variant with boost::python by Mario Lang.

boost::python and boost::variant

by Mario Lang

From the post:

However, there is one aspect of C++ data types that I couldn't figure out how to interface with Python, which are C++ discriminated unions, or more specifically, heterogeneous containers. While Python has no problems with containers containing objects of different types, C++ does not make this very easy by default.