Month: August 2020

Why I like C++ attributes

Posted on by Marius Bancila

Attributes are an underrated feature of the C++ language, in my opinion. I am saying this because I rarely see attributes used in code or samples featured in articles, videos, or talks. Although some of the standard attributes are targeted towards library implementers or address a limited number of scenarios (such as [[no_unique_address]], [[noreturn]], or [[carries_dependency]]), there are several that are quite useful in many situations. I refer here to [[nodiscard]], [[maybe_unused]], and [[deprecated]], which are the attributes I will talk about in this post.

C++20 books

Posted on by Marius Bancila

The C++20 standard is complete and is supposed to be published later this year after the voting of the final draft takes place. However, there are books already with C++20 content. In this blog post I present a list of them. The C++ Standard Library, 3rd edition – Rainer Grimm Rainer is an author, consultant,…

No more plain old data

Posted on by Marius Bancila

When working in C++, you often hear about POD types (which stands for Plain Old Data). PODs are useful for communicating with code written in other programming languages (such as C or .NET languages). They can also be copied using memcpy (which is important because this is a fast, low-level function that provides performance benefits), and have other characteristics that are key for some scenarios. However, the new C++20 standard has deprecated the concept of POD types in favor of two more refined categories, which are trivial and standard-layout types. In this post, I will discuss what these categories are and when to use instead of POD.