Developer Adventure

I decided to change name of this blog, because I am going to present not only C++ topics here. From today you can expect topics describing problems and features of following domains of software development: C++ programming language features, problems, issues C  programming language features, problems, issues Unix/Linux programming (ex. standard Linux C library, system calls etc.) Embedded Linux programming (problems and solutions related to Embedded Software Development) Software Development Design - Object Oriented Programming, Design Patterns etc. Software Development Life Cycle Sometimes I will also present some articles related to other programming languages like: Python, Java, JavaScript, HTML, CSS etc.  As you noticed range of topics in this blog has been significantly extended. It should this blog more interesting.

C++11 standard provides new way of customized literal constants called user defined literals . Thanks to that user can define own suffixes for standard literals (ex. digits) which defines it better and makes it better readable. Example of such suffixes could be: _meters, _kilograms, _squareMeters etc. For better understanding user-defined literals concept, let's take a look on the below example code: Output of that code is: In point one we can see concept of operator overloading function which should be used in order to define user-defined literals. In our example we are defining suffixex _meters and _squareMeters which will be used for imporve readability of code of calculations based on that units. Point II shows how we can use user-defined literals to assign values to variables. Such usage definitely makes code better readable and easier to understand. Point III, shows how we can use other suffix (_squareMeters) in comparison calculations. As we can see, our units a...

Today I would like to present another new feature of C++11 standard - noexcept specifier. This specifier allows to specify function which does not throw any exception . It should be used be used wherever possible to notify user that function should be throw and it makes such function non-throwable self-documented (similar to usage const ). Its usage is similar to usage const function specifier. The difference is that while const function tries to modify data it we have compilation error. In case of noexcept function throws any exception, code compiles, however it std::terminate function is invoked when we achieve throwing exception in such function. To understand it better, take a look on below example: Output of this example is: In point I, we are defining function as non-throwable using noexcept specifier. Such function should not throw, however in our example we are throwing exception in order to present what happens when noexcept function tries to throw except...

Stack unwinding is normally a concept of removing function entries from call stack (also known as Execution stack, Control stack, Function stack or Run-time stack). Call Stack is a stack data structure that stores active functions' addresses and helps in supporting function call/return mechanism. Every time when a function is called, an entry is made into Call stack which contains the return address of the calling function where the control needs to return after the execution of called function. This entry is called by various names like stack frame , activation frame or activation record. With respect to exception handling , stack Unwinding is a process of linearly searching function call stack to reach exception handler. When an exception occurs, if it is not handled in current function where it is thrown, the function Call Stack is unwound until the control reaches try block and then passes to catch block at the end of try block to handle exception. Also, in this proc...

Exception handling is programming feature helpful for programmers to handle run time error conditions. Run time error conditions can be like division by zero, unable to allocate memory due to scarcity, trying to open a file which doesn’t exist etc. There are two types of exceptions. One is Standard exceptions provided by C++ Standard library and other type is User defined exceptions. Now, to handle any exception, we should understand 3 main block of exception statement which are as follows: throw block - in this block, we throw an exception. The operand of the throw statement decides the type of exception occurred. Once this line is executed, program jumps to catch block to handle the exception occurred. catch block - is the block where we handle exception. This is also called as exception handler and this block is written immediately after the try block as shown in example. This can be written similar to a normal function with at leas...

Last week I participated in ACCU 2014 Conference in Bristol (UK). That was great and fruitful time for me where I find out lot of information about C++ and Software development in general, as well as I met few interesting people. I would like to share few information from that conference with you. During the conference we listen interesting speeches of many C/C++ experts such as: Howard Hinnant - he presened interesting speech about C++11 Move Semantics , presenting interesting short explanation how std::move actually work as well as detail presentation of generation of Special Member Function (class members which are automatically generated by compiler) for different cases with and without move constructor and move assignment operator. At the end he presented detail implementation of basic move constructor and move assignment operator . Detail explanation of move semantics will be presented on this blog soon. Anthony Williams - author of book C++ Concurrency in Action and d...

In the previous C++ Multithreading article I presented you how to pass parameters between threads. Take a detail look on the output of that example once again: In the first line of that output you can notice that output text from two threads is mixed. You are probably wondering why it happens? It is because we are not protecting resources which are shared by two threads (in this example cout stream is shared in both threads) which causes multithreading's phenomenon called race condition . Because threads switching and accessing to shared resources are managed by operating system we do not know when std::cout stream will be accessed by main thread and when it will be accessed by second thread. Therefore in the previous article I mentioned that output of the example can be little different on your computer than my output example. What's more it is possible that this output will be different for few consecutive invoking of the example on the same machine. It is beca...