In Poland, it’s only a few hours until the end of the year, so it’s an excellent chance to make a summary of things that happened to C++! As you might guess the whole year was dominated by the finalization and publication of C++17. Yet, there are some other “big” things that happened.

When I was working on the Smart Pointer Reference Card I run into a quite interesting issue. It appears that in some cases memory allocated for the object controlled by smart_ptr might not be released until all weak pointers are also ‘dead’. Such case was surprising to me because I thought that the moment the last share_ptr goes down, the memory is released.

Modern C++ stresses the use of RAII objects to manage resources. One of the easiest ways is just to start using unique_ptr across your code. Let’s see how we can leverage this smart pointer type. I’ve come up with 5 (or more?) reasons where unique_ptr shines. Intro One of my favourite features of modern C++ is smart pointers.

How do you see the new C++ standard? Is it ok? Great? Meh? Last week, after a few years of break, I presented my new talk that addressed the above question! It happened at the Cracow C++ Local Group. Have a look what’s inside this talk. Intro Listing all of the features from the new standard might sound simple at first glance.

This year I had a chance to visit Wroclaw for the 4th edition of Code Dive! Two days of a great programming conference! Briefly: many of topics related to C++, two days, 40 presentations, lots of people and a beautiful city. What more do you need? :) Continue below to read my report from the event.

For my article series about C++17 features, I’ve made a separate entry about new attributes. At first sight, I thought that [[nodiscard]] is just another simple and a rarely used thing. But later I thought… hmmm… maybe it might be valuable? One reason is that [[nodiscard]] might be handy when enforcing code contracts.

Do you write code 100% of your job time? I’m guessing the answer is no. Ignoring the whole management part, meetings, coffee, youtube, cats, etc, even if you’re sitting at your keyboard you’re not typing all the time. So what else are you doing? The short answer: you’re probably figuring out what to write and where to add new features (and what to fix)… so you’re mostly reading and trying to understand the code.

Three weeks ago with Jonathan from Fluent C++, we announced a coding challenge: link here. Let’s meet the winner and discuss some of the best solutions (Our choice is quite surprising! See why :)) First of all, I’d like to thank you all for the submissions to the challenge. The task was ambitious!

One of the key points of modern C++, as I observe, is to be expressive and use proper types. For example, regarding null pointers, rather than just writing a comment: void Foo(int* pInt); // pInt cannot be null I should actually use not_null<int *> pInt. The code looks great now, isn’t it?

Have you been at Cpp Con this year? I haven’t, but still I plan to watch some good C++ talks. Can you help me a bit and add your notes? Last update: 14th October 2017 Intro Cpp Con 2017 is over and recently the videos from the talks started to appear.

Let’s put C++17 in practice! One of the good ways to do it is to take part in a coding challenge. So together with Jonathan Boccara from Fluent C++ we invite you to participate in “The Expressive C++17 coding challenge”. The Expressive C++17 coding challenge Jonathan made a few contests on his blog (for example this one), and I thought it might be fun to do something similar for C++17.

The last post in the series about C++17 (STL utils) was posted on 4th September. It happened to be just two days before the final C++17 spec was approved! :) C++17 is formally approved 2017-09-06 by Herb Sutter herbsutter.com/2017/09/06/c17-is-formally-approved/ In this post, I’d like to make a little summary, and I also have a bonus for you :)