In programming, a function is a block of code that performs a computational task. (In practice, people write functions that perform many tasks, which is not very good, but it’s a topic beyond the purpose of this article). Functions are a fundamental concept of programming languages and C++ makes no exception. In fact, in C++ there is a large variety of functions that has evolved over time. In this article, I will give a brief walkthrough of this evolution starting with C++11. Since there are many things to talk about, I will not get into too many details on these topics but will provide various links for you to follow if you want to learn more.
Marius Bancila
Use Cases of Variable Templates in C++
Since C++14 variables can also be templatized. A variable template defines a family of variable (when declared at namespace scope) or a family of static data members (when defined at class scope). The question is, what is the benefit of variable templates?
Virtual Inheritance in C++
The C++ language supports the concept of multiple inheritance. This means one class can have multiple base classes. This feature is not available in other languages, such as C# or Java. The designers of these languages didn’t considered the benefits of supporting this feature to worth the effort. And probably one of the reasons is that multiple inheritance may lead to the so-called diamond inheritance problem, when one class derives from two different classes, that in turn derive from the same class. In this article, I will discuss the problem as well as the solution in C++.
Synchronized output streams in C++20
One of the many things included in C++20 is the support for synchronizing output streams for operations that may have race conditions.
Writing a simple logging function in C++20
Logging is an important feature of any serious program. In general, one should use established libraries for logging. However, for the sake of showcasing several new features from C++20, now available in Visual Studio 2019 16.10, I will show, in this post, how one can quickly write a simple logging function.
How to build high DPI aware native Windows desktop applications
If you’re developing native applications for Windows using Win32 or MFC and you want to support high DPIs so that the application looks crisp on any display, you have to do a lot of things by hand. That is because the technologies for building native UIs, that is MFC, GDI, GDI+, do not provide DPI scaling support. In this article, I will walk through some of the problems of supporting DPI scaling and the solutions for them.
Initializing statement for if/switch/foreach
There are several statements in C++ whose syntax was modified in recent versions of the standard. I refer here to the if and switch statements that were modified in C++17 to include initializing statements, and the range-based for loop that supports the same as of C++20. Their general form is shown in the following table:
Express one of multiple options in a nice way
We often find ourselves writing if statements where a variable is compared with several values either to check if it matches one of them or that it doesn’t match any. Here is an example:
int option = ...;
// at lease a value is matched
if (option == 12 || option == 23 || option == 42)
{
std::cout << "it's a good option\n";
}
// no value is matched
if (option != 12 && option != 23 && option != 42)
{
std::cout << "it's a bad option\n";
}
This example has three comparison values for each case, but it could be 5, or 10, or any number. If it’s too many then perhaps a different approach should be taken. However, the question is, how do we express this in a simpler way in C++, rather than a long if condition?
The choice between typename and class
When working with C++ templates, you have probably seen typename and class used interchangeably. Is there a difference between them? This post will explain when these two keywords can be used in templates. Let’s consider the following example: In this context, when declaring a type template parameter, there is no difference, they are interchangeable. They … Read more
Using Microsoft Edge in a native Windows desktop app – part 4
In the previous articles, we learned how to perform navigation in a Windows desktop application and how navigation events work. However, until recently, it was not possible to perform POST or GET request using custom headers or content. This feature was added in version 705.50. In this fourth article of the series, we will look in detail at how to perform POST requests with custom headers and content.