Table Of ContentBoost C++ Application
Development
Cookbook
Over 80 practical, task-based recipes to create
applications using Boost libraries
Antony Polukhin
BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
Boost C++ Application Development
Cookbook
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First published: August 2013
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Cover Image by Suresh Mogre ([email protected])
Credits
Author Project Coordinator
Antony Polukhin Anugya Khurana
Reviewers Proofreader
Béla Tibor Bartha Stephen Silk
Paul A. Bristow
Indexer
Acquisition Editor Monica Ajmera Mehta
Akram Hussain
Graphics
Lead Technical Editor Abhinash Sahu
Arun Nadar Ronak Druv
Technical Editors Production Coordinator
Sampreshita Maheshwari Conidon Miranda
Vivek Pillai
Cover Work
Hardik B. Soni
Conidon Miranda
Copy Editors
Adithi Shetty
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Sayanee Mukherjee
Alfida Paiva
Aditya Nair
About the Author
Antony Polukhin was born in Russia. As a child, he could speak the Russian and Hungarian
languages and learned English at school. Since his school days, he was participating in different
mathematics, physics, and chemistry competitions and winning them.
He was accepted into University twice: once for taking part in a city mathematics competition
and again for gaining high score in an internal Universities mathematics and physics
challenge. In his university life, there was not a year when he did not participate in an exam:
he gained 'A's in all disciplines by writing highly difficult programs for each teacher. He met
his future wife in university and graduated with honors.
For more than three years, he worked in a VoIP company developing business logic for a
commercial alternative to Asterisc. During those days he started contributing to Boost and
became a maintainer of the Boost.LexicalCast library. He also started making translations
to Russian for Ubuntu Linux at that time.
Today, he develops a query engine for graph-oriented databases and continues to contribute
to the open source. You may find his code in Boost libraries such as Any, LexicalCast,
TypeTraits, Variant, and others.
He has been happily married for a year now.
I would like to thank my family, especially my wife, Irina Polukhina, for
drawing sketches of pictures and diagrams all through the book. Great
thanks to Paul Anthony Bristow for reviewing this book and getting through
the insane number of commas that I used in the first drafts. I would also like
to thank all of the people from the Boost community for writing those great
libraries and for opening an amazing word of C++ for me.
About the Reviewers
Béla Tibor Bartha is a professional software engineer working on various technologies
and languages. Although in the last four years he's been working on iOS and OS X
applications, C++ is his old passion along with game development as personal projects.
Paul A. Bristow is a long-time member of the Boost community (and contributor to Boost.
Math) who has watched with amusement and amazement at how C++ has been made to
do so many wonderful things that it was never designed to do (many of which are nicely
demonstrated in this book).
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Table of Contents
Preface 1
Chapter 1: Starting to Write Your Application 7
Introduction 7
Getting configuration options 8
Storing any value in a container/variable 13
Storing multiple chosen types in a variable/container 16
Using a safer way to work with a container that stores multiple chosen types 18
Returning a value or flag where there is no value 22
Returning an array from a function 25
Combining multiple values into one 28
Reordering the parameters of function 30
Binding a value as a function parameter 34
Using the C++11 move emulation 37
Making a noncopyable class 40
Making a noncopyable but movable class 42
Chapter 2: Converting Data 47
Introduction 47
Converting strings to numbers 48
Converting numbers to strings 51
Converting numbers to numbers 53
Converting user-defined types to/from strings 56
Casting polymorphic objects 59
Parsing simple input 61
Parsing input 66
Chapter 3: Managing Resources 71
Introduction 71
Managing pointers to classes that do not leave scope 72
Table of Contents
Reference counting of pointers to classes used across methods 74
Managing pointers to arrays that do not leave scope 77
Reference counting pointers to arrays used across methods 79
Storing any functional objects in a variable 82
Passing a function pointer in a variable 85
Passing C++11 lambda functions in a variable 86
Containers of pointers 88
Doing something at scope exit 91
Initializing the base class by a member of the derived class 93
Chapter 4: Compile-time Tricks 97
Introduction 97
Checking sizes at compile time 98
Enabling the usage of templated functions for integral types 102
Disabling templated functions' usage for real types 106
Creating a type from number 108
Implementing a type trait 111
Selecting an optimal operator for a template parameter 113
Getting a type of expression in C++03 116
Chapter 5: Multithreading 121
Introduction 121
Creating an execution thread 122
Syncing access to a common resource 126
Fast access to common resource using atomics 131
Creating a work_queue class 134
Multiple-readers-single-writer lock 138
Creating variables that are unique per thread 141
Interrupting a thread 144
Manipulating a group of threads 146
Chapter 6: Manipulating Tasks 149
Introduction 149
Registering a task for processing an arbitrary datatype 150
Making timers and processing timer events as tasks 154
Network communication as a task 157
Accepting incoming connections 164
Executing different tasks in parallel 169
Conveyor tasks processing 171
Making a nonblocking barrier 176
Storing an exception and making a task from it 181
Getting and processing system signals as tasks 185
ii
Table of Contents
Chapter 7: Manipulating Strings 189
Introduction 189
Changing cases and case-insensitive comparison 189
Matching strings using regular expressions 192
Searching and replacing strings using regular expressions 196
Formatting strings using safe printf-like functions 199
Replacing and erasing strings 201
Representing a string with two iterators 203
Using a reference to string type 206
Chapter 8: Metaprogramming 211
Introduction 211
Using type "vector of types" 212
Manipulating a vector of types 217
Getting a function's result type at compile time 222
Making a higher-order metafunction 225
Evaluating metafunctions lazily 227
Converting all the tuple elements to strings 230
Splitting tuples 234
Chapter 9: Containers 239
Introduction 239
Comparing strings in an ultra-fast manner 240
Using an unordered set and map 244
Making a map, where value is also a key 248
Using multi-index containers 252
Getting the benefits of single-linked list and memory pool 258
Using flat associative containers 263
Chapter 10: Gathering Platform and Compiler Information 267
Introduction 267
Detecting int128 support 268
Detecting RTTI support 270
Speeding up compilation using C++11 extern templates 272
Writing metafunctions using simpler methods 274
Reducing code size and increasing performance of user-defined
types (UDTs) in C++11 276
The portable way to export and import functions and classes 279
Detecting the Boost version and getting latest features 282
Chapter 11: Working with the System 285
Introduction 285
Listing files in a directory 286
iii
