Software

Using the C++23 std::expected type

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The C++23 standard will feature a new utility type called std::expected. This type either contains an expected value, or an unexpected one, typically providing information about the reason something failed (and the expected value could not be returned). This feature is, at this time, supported in GCC 12 and MSVC 19.33 (Visual Studio 2022 17.3). In this article, we’ll see what std::expected is and how it can be used.

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requires expressions and requires clauses in C++20

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The C++20 standard added constraints and concepts to the language. This addition introduced two new keywords into the language, concept and requires. The former is used to declare a concept, while the latter is used to introduce a requires expression or a requires clause. These two could be confusion at first, so let’s take a look at which is which and what is their purpose.

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Unwrapping WinUI3 for C++

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The Windows UI Library 3, known shortly as WinUI 3, is a native UI framework that ships with the Windows App SDK. This is an SDK complementary to the Windows SDK, WPF, WinForms, and Win32. It provides a new unified set of APIs and tools that can be used to develop desktop apps on Windows 11 (as well as downwards to Windows 10, version 1809). I decided to have a look at what this framework provides and this post is written as I am trying it. To evaluate it, I’ll try to build a small application that does conversion between Celsius and Fahrenheit degrees as you type in a field.

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What has the standard committee ever done for us?

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Disclaimer

Should go without saying but… this post is a pamphlet. It’s only intended to make you smile.

Every time I see people complaining on social media about the C++ standard committee not doing this or that I remember the famous scene from the movie Live of Brian when the Jews debate the benefits of the Roman occupation. However, put into the C++ world, the scene would be as follows:

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Finding the second largest element in a range

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In recent days, there’s been a question coming up on twitter: how do you find the second largest element in an array (container)? People are providing different answers. As usual, there are multiple solutions to this problem and they depend on the actual requirements: could this operation have side effect (change the original range) or should it be left untouched? In this post, I will discuss several solutions in C++ to this problem.

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Three C++23 features for common use

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C++23 is the current working version of the C++ standard. No major feature has been included so far, but a series of smaller ones as well as many defect reports have made it already to the standard. You can check the current status as well as the compiler support for the new features here. Many of these new features are small improvements or things you probably wouldn’t use on a regular basis. However, I want to point here to three C++23 features that, in my opinion, stand out among the others as more likely to be used more often.

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The Evolution of Functions in Modern C++

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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.

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