It is very important to understand the details of const qualifiers to help improve the quality of your code and the efficiency of your coding — C++ const The C++ const qualifier is one of the first things you learn about C++. You usually start by understanding that we should use const for constants. That may be true, but actually we should think of it as a way to tell compilers and other programmers our intentions about our…

Understanding what actually happens when we use static local variables and when we should use them — C++ Storage Duration One of the basics we often miss when learning C++ is understanding the details of storage duration. The storage duration of an object determines its lifetime. It also determines in which segment of memory the object will be stored, whether it be on the stack, heap, or data. There are…

Curiously recurring template patterns can help us write common functionality by combining templates and inheritance — What is the CRTP Idiom? CRTP stands for Curiously Recurring Template Patterns, a name coined by James O. Coplien in his 1995 paper. It is about specializing base classes using derived classes as template arguments. It looks like the following: This is a very common example that we can find on the internet when…

Writing Inter-Process Message Passing Framework to improve the expressiveness of our code and make our code more elegant. — Inter-Process Communication Processes — a recap We often read online that a process is a program in execution, but wait a minute, what exactly does that really mean? For some, it might not be very clear what that means. Wikipedia provides a hopefully clearer definition: A process is the instance of a computer program that is…

Fighting boredom in a hotel room. Travel Restrictions Still Everywhere Travel is still restricted worldwide. Many countries have changed their regulations to use multiple tests instead of asking visitors to stay in hotel rooms, but not all. Some countries still require people to be quarantined in hotel rooms. For short quarantine like 2N3D, that’s…

A framework for passing messages between threads without having to worry about low-level threading code — Inter-thread Message Passing in C++ Overview In many cases, developers have to deal with multi-threading when developing applications. When dealing with multiple threads, we almost certainly need to synchronize them, and one of the synchronization methods is message passing. In this article, I will start with implementing inter-thread message passing in C++ using the standard library…

Understand how we can inspect the properties of callables to improve the level of abstraction in our code — Template Metaprogramming Overview Template Metaprogramming (TMP) in C++ is a technique that uses templates to perform calculations during compile time. This technique can be thought of as programming with types to generate source code. Yes, it is coding to generate code. This technique is mainly used in libraries to make them generic. This…

Why STL Containers can fragment your memory and how to avoid it — How STL Containers Allocate Memory — Blocks and Chunks STL Containers offer a variety of data structures that we can conveniently use when coding in C++. There are three types of containers: Sequence Containers Associative Containers Unordered Associative Containers Sequence containers are containers that can be accessed sequentially while associative containers are those that are in the form of…

Understanding how we can control memory allocation/deallocation of small objects to avoid memory fragmentation in C++ — Overview — Why Do We Need Memory Pools Knowing how dynamic memory allocation/deallocation works helps us understand why our memory can become fragmented. Memory fragmentation refers to a condition in which small blocks of memory are allocated across the memory among larger blocks. …