Rainer Grimm - The C++ Standard Library: Fourth Edition Includes C++23

Rick Audet

Senior Engineer, Dolby Laboratories

Odin Holmes

CEO/CTO at Auto-Intern GmbH

Ramon Wartala

Director Technology at Performance Media GmbH

The C++ Standard Library is a quick reference to the standard library of the current C++23 standard ISO/IEC 14882:2023. C++23 has more than 2100 pages and follows the big C++20 standard. In contrast, C++23 and C++17 are neither a big nor small C++ standards. C++14 is a small addition to C++11. C++11 had more than 1,300 pages and was published in 2011. That was 13 years after the first and only C++ standard, C++98. Of course, there is also C++03, published in 2003. But C++03 is considered a bug-fix release.

This quick reference aims is to provide a concise reference to the C++ standard library. This book assumes that you are familiar with C++. If so, you will get the most benefit out of this book. If C++ is new to you, you should start with a textbook about core C++. Once you have mastered a book about the core language, you can make your next big step by reading this book. To make your job easier, I have provided many short code snippets to connect theory and practice.

The book should be a reference for C++ and should, therefore, have an index. Leanpub does not support the creation of an index. So Ive made it based on regular expressions, naming conventions, a lot of python magic, and a long table that I had to split for each page. Here is the problem. The index is only fully available in the pdf format of the book.

I promise only a few conventions.

I use boxes for unique information, tips, and warning.

Information text.

Tip description.

Warning description.

I dont particularly appreciate using directives and declarations because they hide the librarys namespace. I use them so that the origin can always be deduced from the using directive (using namespace std;) or the using declaration (using std::cout;). Still, because of the limited length of a page, I have to use them from time to time.

Only header files of the featured functionality are shown in the code snippets. true or false is displayed in the output code snippets for boolean values, and
is not used.When your compiler supports the modularized standard library in C++23, you can replace the headers with an import std statement.

To be concise, I only present short code snippets in this book. The name of the entire program is in the first line of the code snippet.

I call instances of fundamental data types values, which C++ inherited from C. Instances of more advanced types, which often consist of fundamental types, are called objects. Objects are typically instances of user-defined types or containers.

First, I want to thank Alexandra Follenius, the lector at OReilly, for the German book C++ Standardbibliothek. The German book is the ancestor of this book. For my book C++ Standardbibliothek Karsten Ahnert, Guntram Berti, Dmitry Ganyushin, Sven Johannsen, Torsten Robitzki, Bart Vandewoestyne, and Felix Winter were very valuable proofreaders. A lot of thanks to all of them.

I started a request in my English blog for translating this book to English www.ModernesCpp.com. I received a much higher response than I expected. Special thanks to all of you, including my son Marius, the first proofreader.

Here are the alphabetically ordered names: Mahesh Attarde, Rick Audet, Pete Barrow, Michael Ben-David, Dave Burns, Alvaro Fernandez, Juliette Grimm, George Haake, Clare Macrae, Arne Mertz, Ian Reeve, Jason Turner, Bart Vandewoestyne, Ivan Vergiliev, and Andrzej Warzynski.

The idea of the book is relatively easy to paraphrase: What every professional C++ programmer should know about the C++ standard library. Because of this intention, I left many answers unanswered; therefore, I provide you with the links to the details at the beginning of each new topic. The link will refer to the excellent online resource www.cppreference.com.

Let me introduce Cippi. Cippi will accompany you in this book. I hope you like her.