In Part I of this series on Boost, we looked at the basics of how to create and run threads using the Boost libraries. But once you have more than one thread running in a process, you have to deal with the problems and challenges that threads can introduce. So, before delving into the mechanics of how to use mutexes and other threading constructs, we look at what can go wrong - and how to avoid it.
The STL makes it easy to create lists, iterate over lists, and apply a function to each member of a list. So how do you filter a vector according to some criteria? It's not hard, but the obvious solution isn't quite enough. Here's how.
Boost is an incredibly powerful collection of portable class libraries for C++. There are classes for such tasks as date/time manipulation, filesystem interfaces, networking, numerical programming, interprocess communication and much more.
The Boost documentation is substantial, but can still be daunting to new users. So this article is the first of a series on using Boost, starting with basic threading. It aims to provide an accessible introduction, with complete working examples.
Writing “const-correct” code will improve the quality and maintainability of your code. It is especially important and useful when writing Object-Oriented code, as objects are often passed around as constant references. Properly declaring non-mutating methods as const allows you to safely call any const method on such a reference. It is part of good type-safe practice and good code hygiene. So how do we do it?
The Standard Template Library (STL) for C++ provides a set of powerful and flexible templated container classes. Never again will you have to hand-craft a doubly-linked list (and get your pointer arithmetic mixed up) -- just use std::list<T>.
Now most of the idiomatic C++ code I've read that uses STL iterators uses the prefix operator++ to move the iterator forward. And so I had long ago adopted this too, with a vague recollection of having read somewhere that it performed better. But why? Good question... (Updated: fixed formatting, got numbers the right way around.)
