What could be as simple as incrementing a variable by one? Ignoring overflow, what else could possibly go wrong? As it turns out, quite a lot as this little quiz demonstrates.
Tag: cpp
The dangers of casting pointers
There are various dangers when casting pointers to different types but as a general rule, casting to a void pointer and back to the original pointer is considered safe. Unfortunately, this is not always the case as this little quiz demonstrates.
String literals and pointers
Do you know how to access c-style literal strings? Try this two-part quiz and see if you are able to unravel the different semantics of character pointers and arrays.
Exceptions to the rule
The C++ Standard is a pretty large and complex document; however, it is the bible as far as writing C++ code is concerned. The standard is full of exceptions that prove the rule, and this quiz demonstrates just one trivial example.
Comparing structs
This little quiz explores the pitfalls of trying to compare structs. Do you know the right way to check if two structs are the same?
Copying to stdout using STL
The STL (Standard Template Library) is a collection of generic algorithms and data structures. This little quiz demonstrates one of the many useful things one can achieve with just a few lines of code when utilizing the power of this library.
Separating C++ template declaration and implementation
The following question was the inspiration for this short article:”Splitting a template and class into definition and declaration.“. In this question the asker asks, “I have the code below, which is all well and good but I’d like to move the definition of the setListener method to the cpp file, yet I seem to be having difficulty doing this as I get complaints about the template needing arguments?”.
Continue reading “Separating C++ template declaration and implementation”
Function pointers vs. Functors
Often, when implementing a feature, you won’t know how certain events should be handled at the point where they occur and you’d rather defer to the user of your function or class. For example, a XML parser will extract a tag from the source code, what should it do now that it has this tag?
Return Value Optimization
In days of old, returning something by value from a function in C++ was necessarily avoided because it would, invariably, involve one or even two copies of the object being created and potentially costly calls to a copy-constructor and destructor. Advances in compiler optimizations have all but eliminated this concern thanks to a clever set of optimizations implemented by most modern compilers.
Sealing a C++ Class
Unlike C#, C++ doesn’t have native support for sealing classes (so they cannot be sub-classed). At the cost of a virtual base class pointer it is possible to implement a pseudo sealing mechanism.
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