For quite some time now, I am hoping to come across a book on modern C++ idiom as comprehensive as the Purple book by James Coplien! Finally, I got bored of the long wait and a thought came to my mind - This is Web 2.0 and open knowledge era. Why don't I start writing myself? and ask the world to contribute to it? So here we go! A new free, open book on modern C++ idioms called More C++ Idioms is taking shape on en.wikibooks.org And everyone's invited!
It's official: C++11 has two meta-programming languages embedded in it! One is based on templates and other one using constexpr . Templates have been extensively used for meta-programming in C++03. C++11 now gives you one more option of writing compile-time meta-programs using constexpr . The capabilities differ, however. The meta-programming language that uses templates was discovered accidently and since then countless techniques have been developed. It is a pure functional language which allows you to manipulate compile-time integral literals and types but not floating point literals. Most people find the syntax of template meta-programming quite abominable because meta-functions must be implemented as structures and nested typedefs. Compile-time performance is also a pain point for this language feature. The generalized constant expressions (constexpr for short) feature allows C++11 compiler to peek into the implementation of a function (even classes) and perform optimization...
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